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The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Free Literature Study Guides
The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Melvyn Bragg Quotes

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

– Melvyn Bragg

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

– Melvyn Bragg

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.

– Melvyn Bragg

I’ll never forget my interview with Barry Humphries – one of the oddest I’ve ever done. He insisted that for half the time he appeared as Dame Edna. So I interviewed the real Barry Humphries in a suit and tie, and then I interviewed Edna in full fig in her dressing room, where she criticised Barry mercilessly.

– Melvyn Bragg

I don’t feel like I’m slowing down.

– Melvyn Bragg

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

– Melvyn Bragg

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.

– Melvyn Bragg

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.

– Melvyn Bragg

I’m a class mongrel.

– Melvyn Bragg

Love of place is one of the characteristics I enjoy most about novelists.

– Melvyn Bragg

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.

– Melvyn Bragg

I’m addicted to ‘Game Of Thrones.’

– Melvyn Bragg

Well, I don’t think I’m good-looking… I know people who are good-looking, and I’m not good-looking.

– Melvyn Bragg

I love writing, and I love making arts programmes.

– Melvyn Bragg

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.

– Melvyn Bragg

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.

– Melvyn Bragg

The abolition of slavery was driven by the King James Bible. It gave slaves a common language and purpose.

– Melvyn Bragg

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.

– Melvyn Bragg

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.

– Melvyn Bragg

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.

– Melvyn Bragg

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.

– Melvyn Bragg

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.

– Melvyn Bragg

Control, like curiosity, can be an exterminator.

– Melvyn Bragg

It was my idea for high culture and popular culture to be treated equally.

– Melvyn Bragg

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

– Melvyn Bragg

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

– Melvyn Bragg

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.

– Melvyn Bragg

Magna Carta has 63 clauses in abbreviated Latin. Two of them that are still on the statute book, numbers 39 and 40, could be said to have changed the way in which the free world has grown.

– Melvyn Bragg

People in jobs that they hate must be worn out.

– Melvyn Bragg

I enjoy what was called ‘swotting’ in my day.

– Melvyn Bragg

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