I love writing, and I love making arts programmes.

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

I have written favourably in support of subsidy for the arts since the 1960s, and I continue to believe absolutely in subsidy, as I do in the BBC licence fee.

Control, like curiosity, can be an exterminator.

In 1997, the Labour government set out to strengthen funding for the arts - and achieved it.

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.

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.

In music, the Specials brought a city, Coventry, bombed out for a second time and riven with racism, to a celebration between black and white musicians and their music.

I just got fed up with the Protestantism that I'd been brought up with being rubbed out, disregarded. There's an awful lot of frailty and doubt about it, which I understand and share, but there are certain things you just have to acknowledge.

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 was born in a radio world, and I got so much from it.

I'm going to try and make you take the Beatles and Eric Clapton as seriously as the Berlin Philharmonic and Simon Rattle.

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.

My memory seems to be holding on quite well. There is no reason why it shouldn't if you keep training it.

I'm addicted to 'Game Of Thrones.'

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.

People in jobs that they hate must be worn out.

Sometimes, you're just moved by people's journeys.

I don't get nervous when I'm interviewing someone on film - it can be cut, and we can do it again. It is quite nerve-racking doing things live.

A structure is a bit like a story. People will go along with you - they see where you're going.

To give religion two minutes a day, in its own space, isn't exactly selling general morality or atheism short.

That's why writing is important to me. Time goes past, and you've been somewhere and come back that hasn't hurt you, and you've been somebody else.

Now, perfectly ordinary people will give each other hugs. I mean, it used to be that a hug was reserved for if you came back from Australia - you know, back in the '40s and '50s.

I don't go around thinking I'm attractive or not attractive. It has never occurred to me. People don't think like that where I come from... No one has ever said, 'Oh, he's a good-looking bloke.' They just didn't use those words about men.