A biography for Melvyn Bragghasn’t been written yet.
“Magna Carta has become totemic. It is in the comedy of Tony Hancock, in the poetry of Kipling, never far from the front pages in a constitutional crisis.”
“I do think the BBC could do more, but I've always thought the BBC could do more - I think there should be more arts programmes full stop.”
“A structure is a bit like a story. People will go along with you - they see where you're going.”
“I enjoy writing. Would I rather be playing golf? No. Would I rather be fishing? No.”
“Television, above all, is the place where people can see the world they live in, and if the world they live in is a world without the arts, so much the worse for television, and so much the worse for the viewers.”
“I don't feel inferior in the slightest to anybody - or superior to anybody, let's get that clear. But I do feel different.”
“I'm going to try and make you take the Beatles and Eric Clapton as seriously as the Berlin Philharmonic and Simon Rattle.”
“The idea that popular arts were shallow by definition and the traditional arts were profound was dead, I thought, and I wanted to prove it.”
“There is an army of the informed wanting to be more informed.”
“I like the fact George R. R. Martin took Shakespeare's political plays as material, but he also took on all sorts of other sensational stories and mingled them in together.”
“Autobiographical fiction is very tricky.”
“I don't want closure, I don't know what that means or why you would want it.”
“As the 20th century unspooled, a cultural warming melted down many frozen class characteristics.”
“I was the only BBC graduate trainee in 1961 interested in arts broadcasting. I knew I wanted to write, and I had to make a living.”
“I'd been writing fiction for 50 years, since I was 19. And when you write fiction, it becomes a way of thinking: there's always a novel around. The strange thing was that after 'Remember Me,' there wasn't.”
“I wanted 'The South Bank Show' to reflect my own life and that of the team around me; to stretch the accepted boundaries and challenge the accepted hierarchies of the arts; to include pop music as well as classical music, television drama as well as theatre drama, and high-definition performers in comedy.”
“I think television does tease out a certain vanity in everybody when you look at yourself and you go, 'Oh Christ.' Maybe that's why my intros get shorter and shorter.”
“I actually admire some of the books by a lot of the writers who write magic realism very much, but it's not for me. It's not what I can do, but even if I could, I don't really want to try.”
“What artists are doing, and what people who are receiving the arts are doing, is entering into this agreement to occupy a parallel world. The parallel world is ever-expanding. We used to think that it existed only for people who were wealthy, well-born, or educated. It isn't like that.”
“Class doesn't create culture anymore.”