Top 50 Peter Morgan Quotes

I don’t think I’m an unhappy person. It’s just an intensity, not a depressive thing. It’s just not having enough layers of skin. It’s exhausting.

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.’

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

It’s important to me what the viewers think.

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

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

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

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

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

Most historians are engaged in fiction.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Nixon had lists upon lists upon lists. They were tragic lists saying, ‘Smile more,’ or, ‘Be stronger – remember, it is your job to spiritually uplift the nation.’ This understanding of his limitations is heartbreaking.

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.

Truth is an illusory notion.

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

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.

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?’

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

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 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.

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.

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 don’t want to become too self-conscious – it’s why I never read reviews, even the good ones.

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.

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

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.

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

As historians write more and more histories, it’s a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy that other historians read their histories and then make synthesis, and certain things just get forgotten and left out and neglected.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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 Andrew Morton or Paul Burrell.

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.

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.

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