Peter Morgan Quotes

You're either a person with a conscience, or you're not. I think I've got quite a fine conscience.

There are so many other people involved in the making of a play or a television series or whatever ... even if you're a novelist there's so much in just the marketing of a book, or even the time ... the zeitgeist, the moment at which it comes out. There's a lot you can't control.

James Reston, Jr.: You know the first and greatest sin of the deception of television is that it simplifies; it diminishes, great complex ideas, stretches of time; whole careers become reduced to a single snapshot.

I'm always pre-occupied with what it is that I'm doing at the moment.

I just try and do something good. But as a writer, you're slightly out of control.

You don't really work together with Clint Eastwood. I mean, he takes the script and he shoots it - and he shoots it very faithfully.

The first and primary requirement for me in a director that I'd want to work with is: do they love writing, and do they love the collaboration process with writers?

The stuff that I have perhaps become known for that's based on fact, and English statesmen shouting at each other all the time, doesn't entirely represent who I am. I am not a politics wonk.

Firms are a bit concerned about things like oil prices and US growth but actually the change (in firms expectations) is quite small so I think broadly theyre looking for more of the same,

I never go back over something I've done and I never watch them again.

I am not a politics wonk. I like the idea of my writing reflecting more about who I am or other people.

We give each other a wide berth even if we have the flu, let alone ... So, I think that's part of the stigma that people who have diseases suffer. It's almost infectious ... if somebody is closer to death, they're almost a bad omen and I think that's terrible.

David Frost: It's all right. He wants me to do this. To finish him off.

John Birt: What?

David Frost: He wants the wilderness.

I can't relax when I'm watching a biographical drama, because it's so close to what it is that I do that I just long for more fiction - so that I can switch off.

There are people who are bound journalistically to a code of ethics that means they can't quote something that isn't sourced, whereas what I do is entirely unsourced. I effectively fictionalise history and yet somehow aim at a greater truth.

If you have distance from the events, then your story can work as an analogy or parable rather than its literal narrative.

Having a phone call from Steven Spielberg was just a fantastic rite of passage. I loved it, and he was very focused, very likable, strictly business, and really sharp.

The real beauty in my professional experience has been friendships and collaborations with filmmakers.

Movies feel like work, and reading fiction feels like work, whereas reading nonfiction feels like pleasure.

I had no intention of providing any answers or solutions, because you'd only look a fool, but I did want to talk about what it's like to be in a state where you're wondering. And perhaps I was also receptive to the fact I was entering middle age and those thoughts come - to pretend that they don't come is just crazy.

I actually speak fluent German. And I live in Vienna, and I'm married to a Viennese woman.

I don't understand and don't enjoy sci-fi, and it's just that if people aren't real, and they don't live in a real and recognizable society, I don't understand what to do.

You can be far more challenging, articulate and intelligent writing for television than you can writing for the cinema.

It might be more difficult because you haven't got a book or a prop, but for the most part I like to write unpaid ... initially and my own stories.

People test movies within an inch of their life so that the entire audience experience is a uniform one.

It's really a lovely feeling to write knowing that failure is taken off the table because if it's bad you just never show it to anyone.

Generally, I read nonfiction. There's very little fiction that I enjoy enough to spend my time reading. I am generally a nonfiction guy.

Once I start writing about somebody, I become very protective of them.

If you're growing up in times of peace and live in a country where there's plenty of food and good healthcare, you grow up without any relationship with death.

You're working with other people and sometimes it doesn't work out the way you want, and sometimes you didn't realise what a mistake you've made until you see it projected.

The minute you become a leader of a country, you go into a very small club. You join that sort of pantheon of other world leaders.

The thing that I'm most in love with is the thing that I'm writing at the moment.

I wrote 'Hereafter' quickly and without mapping it out too much or being too schematic. As an exercise, I think that was incredibly important.

I'm not good at fantasy, no. I have been offered stuff, and I can't get my head around it.

As we go through life our relationship with our own mortality and our inevitable demise increases.

If you don't belong somewhere, that outsider status you have gives you perspective. Of course, another word for outsider is 'exile,' and that's not fun at all.