Compared to the big 19th-century novelists, I've got a slim volume of work.
There is an army of the informed wanting to be more informed.
You ask 20 of your friends how English and American democracy came about. None of them would say that Anglicanism or Protestantism had anything to do with it. But it was crucial to it!
We listened to a lot of drama, adaptations of books, comedy. There was a real love of music expressed in choirs, because you didn't have to have instruments except your voice.
Britain is undoubtedly becoming more cultural. No question of it. People who say it is dumbing down simply don't look around enough. They don't know enough.
Craig has explored the darker recesses of 007's psyche. He has shown us the lonely man. And he has shown him falling truly in love.
Few places on earth have been as affectionately alchemised into literature as the Lake District.
Like university science departments, the arts have shown how they can earn their way and point to an economically newborn future for this country. They show that the U.K. could be a prime provider of imaginative riches and intellectual adventure, which I think are the two great prizes of the 21st century.
Is it rather stupid and dangerous to take Magna Carta so much for granted, as many of us seem to do, and to think of this attitude as 'very English?'
If I meet pals, we do hug each other, and it's very nice, you know... it's something that's come on me late and became second nature, and it's first nature now!
Class doesn't create culture anymore.
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.
The class barricades have been stormed by the forces of a broad culture, which is made up of clusters of individuals who have decided for themselves what they will be in society.
Well, I don't think I'm good-looking... I know people who are good-looking, and I'm not good-looking.
Love of place is one of the characteristics I enjoy most about novelists.
In the 40 or so years I've known David Puttnam, not only has he pursued an outstanding career in films and now politics, but he has been the keeper of the flame of the British film industry.
It is very difficult for middle-aged, institutionalised males who have done so well out of subsidy - and, fair play, given much back - to realise that there is a time to be a well-heeled revolutionary.
As the 20th century unspooled, a cultural warming melted down many frozen class characteristics.
We were working class, and you don't lose that. Later on, I bolted on media middle class... and now people like me are in the House of Lords.
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.
