Top 124 Quotes & Sayings by Peter Morgan - Page 2

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

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

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.

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

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

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

The films of which I'm most proud I've written are the ones that pivot on forgiveness.

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.

Most historians are engaged in fiction.

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

I'm not being presumptuous, I hope, when I say that 'The Crown' is little bit like 'The Godfather.' It is essentially about a family in power and survival.

Most of the things I write, I write on spec. And because I write them on spec, there's less interference. Because there's less interference, they tend to be better.

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.

It's important to me what the viewers think.

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 to write something about him that I felt I could do.

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

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.

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.

As any showrunner will tell you, it is crushing work. It is around the clock. It is like a monastic commitment that you make.

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.

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 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'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.

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

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.

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.

The feelings we all have as 50-year-olds are different than the feelings we all have as 30-year-olds. That informs everything we do.

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

Robert Bolt's storytelling is the kind that I grew up with and aspired to.

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.

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 steps in telling their story that were dishonest. You know in your heart of hearts.

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?'

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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's no way of telling why you want to do things beforehand. Something just grabs you. It might not grab you six months later, and it might not have grabbed you six months before, but at that particular moment it grabs you, so you jump on it.

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.

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.

When you make a choice as a writer about what it is you want to write, and what it is you're going to spend six months thinking about, you have to fall in love.

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.

To what degree are historians chroniclers of the truth and to what degree are they just novelists, frankly?

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.

You can only do the best you can in the minute that you're doing it.

I give everything my best shot and sometimes it doesn't work out and other times it works out much better than you thought.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.