Personal responsibility matters.

Travelling the railways of Europe with a century-old guidebook can be disconcerting: fares, food, and drink seem shockingly expensive compared with what they were; trains and paddle-steamers run to unexpected timetables (assuming they're still running at all); and not only states but whole empires have been wiped from the map.

What's extraordinary about Cobra Mist, and so much of what went on at Orford, was that the public were completely oblivious to it.

Music turns the world upside down.

You never quite know what you do in life that leaves a seed behind that grows into an oak tree.

I have Spanish ancestry and, indeed, speak the language, up to a point.

It's not as if I've ever been to prison or been close to going to prison. The closest I've got is knowing people who have been in jail - after all, I was a member of Parliament - and visiting them there during their sentence.

I got the job I wanted when I was 22, and I'm not going to give it up now.

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

Grime reminds me, if there is an echo, of sort of near enough like Liverpool in the very early Sixties. It's a lot of kids obsessed with music - obsessed with it.

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 am 74 now. Looking back, I have a sense of not really being in control of my career. I just went where it took me.

I enjoy writing. Would I rather be playing golf? No. Would I rather be fishing? No.

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

The arts stimulate imagination. They provoke thought. And then, having done that, all sorts of other things happen.

I sometimes think the only true record of England is the 'Cumberland News.'

One of the great things about making 'Reel History' was meeting British people from all over the class system. It made me realise that London is a different country.

Film has changed the way we look at the past.

The theatre always seems to be in trouble but always thriving. It's deeply comical to me that we agonize about our crap football teams and indifferent Test sides when in front of our noses is a great world success story that no one's interested in apart from those who work in it.

Writers are looking for a story. Using your own life as the basis for a story gives it an association with reality that's a wonderful starting point.

A lot of the novels that I've really enjoyed in my life, whether it's Tolstoy's 'Cossacks,' or 'Sons and Lovers' or 'Jude the Obscure' or 'David Copperfield' or 'Herzog,' have an autobiographical spine.

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.

A lot of the novels I admire are 'admirably provincial.'

Autobiographical fiction is very tricky.