Journalist

More people go to Tate Modern than watch the Arsenal.

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

Class doesn't create culture anymore.

It is in our culture that we don't want to admit that our culture is good.

Once, the arts were opera, ballet, classical music, and everything else deemed highbrow.

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.

Television, above all, is the place where people can see the world they live in, and if the world they live in is a world without the arts, so much the worse for television, and so much the worse for the viewers.

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

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

I wanted 'The South Bank Show' to reflect my own life and that of the team around me; to stretch the accepted boundaries and challenge the accepted hierarchies of the arts; to include pop music as well as classical music, television drama as well as theatre drama, and high-definition performers in comedy.

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.

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.

It's amazing that Sky is the only place that has two dedicated arts channels. The BBC is doing very well... but why don't they do more?

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.

Miliband failed us, his Labour supporters. And Labour will now, because of him, be in a disaster zone for a long time.

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

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!

Work is a great blotter up. It stops you thinking, which is useful. No, it stops you feeling.

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.

The BBC does a sterling job, but I'd like to see it do more. ITV does four arts programmes a year; it used to be 28. At least Sky, with its two arts channels, is trying.