If I meet pals, we do hug each other, and it’s very nice, you know… it’s something that’s come on me late and became second nature, and it’s first nature now! Melvyn Bragg Read Quote
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. Melvyn Bragg Read Quote
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. Melvyn Bragg Read Quote
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. Melvyn Bragg Read Quote
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. Melvyn Bragg Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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. Melvyn Bragg Read Quote
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. Melvyn Bragg Read Quote
My memory seems to be holding on quite well. There is no reason why it shouldn’t if you keep training it. Melvyn Bragg Read Quote