Peter Morgan

“For a younger generation to imagine a time where there was no security at airports - going around the world in the bar of a jumbo jet, 'Tell the plane to wait, I'm running late!' - there is...”

“I make a point of not reading reviews because of the old adage, if you read the good ones then you have to read the bad ones, and if you read the bad ones, you have to, you know... And also...”

“I have always cited the decision by director Stephen Frears to shoot 'Mrs. Henderson Presents' before my script of 'The Queen' as the reason for my taking the plunge as a playwright.”

“I'm very happy for others to engage in conjecture, but if I was ever conscious of what I'm thinking about when I'm writing, oh my God, I'd be totally lost.”

“Belief in God is so deranged that it makes absolutely no sense, but it holds people together somehow.”

“Self-destruction is such an interesting thing for a dramatist, and what's particular to Nixon is how human the failings were that led to his downfall.”

“Every dramatist will tell you that they know deep down what happened in the course of making that film and to what degree they took steps that were convenient and to what degree they took st...”

“As a dramatist, you have 200 choices at every fork in the road. But the audience will reject it if you make the wrong choice, if they feel you are trying to shape the character in a way that...”

“People bang on all the time about whether what I've done is the truth or not. Well, to me, history is just a series of elaborate fictions.”

“I'm not a vindictive person. But I do want to shine a light on human frailty and heroism in equal measure.”

“As a child, I grew up the son of German immigrant parents, so I grew up being teased and called 'Fritz' at school. When I married my wife and went to live in Vienna, I was teased for being a...”

“In a way, I think of the press as my colleagues. I don't want to throw hand grenades at people who do something that's pretty similar to what I do. But at the same time, we all need to take...”

“I wrote a draft of 'Playboy' for Warner Brothers, and it was impossible to really be independent of Hugh Hefner. In the end, Hugh Hefner was unable to take the back seat required to be able...”

“I'm not an artist, and I want to take risks, and when the possibility of failure occurs, it's because the idea is all exciting or interesting as a high wire act, and sometimes you've got to...”

“Truth is an illusory notion.”

“Authorised royal biographers are so straitjacketed, deferential, fawning, and unadventurous that they can only be after a knighthood. Or they're completely scurrilous and insolent, like Andr...”

“I quite like the idea - just as an abstract idea - of 12 people's collective life experience and wisdom being this formidable thing. People say juries can be led - I think 12 people from dif...”

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

“If you start to analyze what you do, it can paralyze you.”

“When I started writing the screenplay for 'The Queen,' about the aftermath of the death of Princess Diana, both Stephen Frears, the director, and Andy Harries, the producer, begged me not to...”