Peter Morgan Quotes

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.

There are so many projects that I’ve written and had to abort because either I felt too distressed by what I was doing to the people who I was writing about, or they couldn’t cope with it because their view of themselves was so far removed from reality.

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 Brit.

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

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 suits you. It rings false immediately. People can sense when you’re being cynical or schematic.

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

It was so interesting to discover Nixon was a Californian. I always think Nixon should come from a cold place.

I’m quick to be upset. My feelings are close to the surface. There is not much gap between a thought and a feeling with me. It makes it difficult for some people. I feel too much.

There’s nothing wrong with anybody from any other country having a perspective on the British royal family. It would be interesting. But I just doubt that they would get the dialogue right.

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

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’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.

It’s madness to hand in a script to a director, leave them alone, and for the director not to want the writer there with rehearsals and the shoot.

It’s important to me what the viewers think.

As a European from a different, younger generation, the trauma that was Nixon’s presidency never really had a hold over me. For one thing, I never voted for him.

By nature of the job, most actors are striking, remarkable, and alpha.

I do have an innate understanding of where a story should or shouldn’t go, in a way that I don’t think can be taught.

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

I prefer my writing to do all the talking for me.

It is devastating, losing a parent. I don’t really know what the effect is, but I suppose people might call me an ambitious man, and I’d say that an ambitious man is a damaged man.

There is something fantastically post-modern about David Frost.

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

A 20-year-old is never going to give death a second thought, whereas someone in their late 50s is going to think about it… I don’t know, 20 times a day.

Everything I write, I’ve written the first draft in Austria.

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

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

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

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 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 different backgrounds, different races, different genders, different ages, it’s hard to hoodwink.

There were a couple of things I lost sleep over with the play ‘Frost/Nixon,’ so I went back and addressed them a bit more in the film.

In some shape or form, we do have an emotional connection to our head of state, even if, for the most part, they seem very remote.

You can’t ask someone to act middle-aged. Someone has to bring their own fatigue to it.

I just feel that if I’m English and writing about an American president, I have got to have someone on my side who can help me out when I’m lapsing into lazy or obvious European skepticism.

I have no directing ambition whatsoever. And as long as I meet filmmakers like Tom Hooper, Stephen Frears, and others who allow that collaboration, I can’t see why I would ever want to direct.

Sometimes you are lucky enough to get offered things, and there is no rhyme or reason. I am very lucky because I come from England, and you have a whole range of things offered to you, from television plays and shows and theatre, so much more to explore, so it’s never really money.

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 because it’s a very, very bewildering and exposing thing.

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

Barack Obama winning the election had an instant impact on everything – race relations, national self-esteem, tolerance. It also had an instant affect on ‘Frost/Nixon.’ At a stroke, instead of being a piece that reminded people of the agony they were in, it became an uplifting message about the agony they had escaped.

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.

I’m constantly having to check my conscience about what I’m writing and the responsibility of what I’m saying.

I’ve done a lot of work in Hollywood and theatre, but to be honest, the biggest pleasure I’ve ever got is from the TV single plays I’ve written. It’s a format where you don’t mind saying, ‘I want to tackle some important themes head on.’

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

For ‘Frost/Nixon,’ I had eight people who were present at those interviews – they were all in the room – and when I interviewed each of them, they had a totally different narrative of events, to the degree where you thought, ‘Were you all really in the same room?’

I can’t imagine anyone thinking, ‘Oh good, it’s awards season!’

Most leading actresses have this energy, this ‘Look at me. Here I am.’ They’re powerful; they’re beautiful.

Some of the things I have written about are a way of connecting with my father – I know he knew who Idi Amin was, and I know he knew who Longford was. And I know he knew who Nixon was, because shortly before he died, I talked to him about Watergate.

There’s something about the soul of a country that is somehow connected to the head of state.

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.

It is a fairly serious thing that you’re doing if you’re writing about people who are still alive and who still have a role in public life. Sometimes you don’t want to be reminded too much of the responsibility.

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.

Ambition interests me because it’s such a surefire indicator of damage.

If you think about what you do, if you become self-conscious about it, you’ve got to be very careful. Because I really like to write without self-awareness of what I’m doing.

I don’t think of the crown as this glamorous thing. It’s this murderous, bejeweled thing, the crown.

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 film ‘The Queen’ came about with a producer saying to me that he wanted me to write about the circumstances behind Diana’s death. I think he was hoping that I would come up with some journalistic scoop that would identify an MI5 covert plot.

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.

The irony of what I do is that the more you reveal someone in their frailties and shortcomings, the more we feel drawn to them and forgiving we feel of them.

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

For ‘Frost/Nixon,’ everyone I spoke to told the story their way. Even people in the room tell different versions. There’s no one truth about what happened in those interviews, so I feel very relaxed about bringing my imagination to the piece. God knows everyone else has.

I am drawn to characters so full of internal contradictions. Idi Amin was one. I loved writing him.

I watch drama on DVD because I can’t stand ad breaks.

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 put Tony Blair in it.

Sometimes if biography is too head-on, it can feel too obvious.

Truth is an illusory notion.

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.

No family is complete without an embarrassing uncle.

I can’t help slightly falling in love with every character I write about. And I quite like writing about people who are vilified.

Sometimes it’s okay for an audience not to understand everything that’s going on.

My experience is, I do a table reading, and it’s literally like it’s written in colossal neon lights what’s wrong with the screenplay.

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

I have a great deal of compassion for those in public life and what we have done to them.

There are many, many things in my work that need redoing – never the structure.

In my peaceful moments, I yearn to write a bank heist like the one in ‘Heat.’

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.