Quotes from Melvyn Bragg

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!

Compared to the big 19th-century novelists, I've got a slim volume of work.

If you look at the creative economy in this country, it's per capita way bigger than any other in the world.

The best of pop in our country is among the best of the arts that we do. And Britain does the arts as well as, and sometimes better than, anybody else on the planet.

There is an army of the informed wanting to be more informed.

As the 20th century unspooled, a cultural warming melted down many frozen class characteristics.

Too old at 72? Careful. Ageism is out. We'll have the law on you!

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 a Labour party supporter, but I'm also a democrat.

History is too often the refuge of the tidy-minded, making neat patterns when the dust has settled.

Few places on earth have been as affectionately alchemised into literature as the Lake District.

I don't want closure, I don't know what that means or why you would want it.

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.

We got a copy of the 'New Statesman' at my grammar school in Wigton, Cumbria, in the 1950s. It sat mint fresh every week on the library table, with two or three other bargain-offer magazines. The 'Statesman' came out of the unimaginable Great World. I started to read it then and have pegged along ever since.

Control, like curiosity, can be an exterminator.

In an arts programme, my job was to go where the talent was. And the talent was in popular culture.

Darwin talks about evolution, but he doesn't say how it started. Maybe the sense of mystery will dissolve in the face of science, but I am not so sure. We are all described by the human genome, but it's getting people nowhere.

In the 1990s, from the estates of Scotland came the phenomenon of Irvine Welsh. 'Trainspotting' demanded its place not only in the high ranks of contemporary fiction but as a describer of a Britain that literally and metaphorically was in a deep mess.

More people go to Tate Modern than watch the Arsenal.

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 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.

I've been making arts programmes for almost 50 years, and every day, I can't believe my luck.

I love writing, and I love making arts programmes.

There's a lot of hours in the week if you use them properly.