Well, I don't think I'm good-looking... I know people who are good-looking, and I'm not good-looking.
The abolition of slavery was driven by the King James Bible. It gave slaves a common language and purpose.
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.
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.
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.
Like university science departments, the arts have shown how they can earn their way and point to an economically newborn future for this country. They show that the U.K. could be a prime provider of imaginative riches and intellectual adventure, which I think are the two great prizes of the 21st century.
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.
There is some brilliant pop music and some very poor classical music. And why shouldn't comedy be treated as seriously as drama?
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.