Top 66 Abi Morgan Quotes

I always say writing a play is like toothache: I find it incredibly painful, and it’s only once the play’s out that the pain is gone.

Life experiences inherently change you as a writer. My sense of fury calmed down when I had children and found a loving partner.

Even if you’ve been a coward all your life, death is a heroic act.

One of the things I think I can do in my lifetime is stop to remind myself that – and keep affirming that – women can sell movies.

I think social media has reinvigorated people’s enthusiasm to be active and to engage.

I was a pretty heartbroken 13-year-old. That was the year my grandmother died and my parents split up.

I’m a cheap date.

I didn’t take into account the critical tsunami that comes with having work going out. I’ve gone from being a complete narcissist, someone who googles my own name, to someone who has to work separately from that to avoid creative paralysis.

I think, in some ways, there’s a point as a television writer that ‘executive producer’ is the natural credit you get, and it can be a vanity title, or you can make of it what you want.

Stage is the place of the playwright: you’re guided by great actors and directors, but it’s the playwright’s word on the page that counts.

I need to be in charge, and that comes from when I was growing up and money was always an issue. I didn’t want to feel the fear of poverty again, and I suppose, in that way, I qualify as Thatcher Youth.

Plays are the marathon of scriptwriting. You fix on a point somewhere in the middle distance, and you start running, and you don’t stop until you get to the end. The theory is that you have something you cannot not say: this is the engine that propels you through to the last page.

It’s quite good when you fall flat on your bum on a creative level. Critics can hate what I do, or I’ve got something completely wrong, and it’s good because that ego thing gets zapped for a while.

As a writer, you’re not even at the party when you work in film. At best, you’re the one laying out the canapes.

Writing comedy is a superpower.

I always deeply admire people who can stay still in a room and wait for people to come to them.

What’s great about the way ‘Shame”s been received is that I kept on thinking there’s no way this film will be received well since I’ve had such a good time.

I never know if I’m the builder or architect. The role shifts all the time. But what I have come to conclude is that the script is the muse.

I got dumped off ‘The Iron Lady’ a month before they started shooting, and then they brought two new writers on. Then I was brought back on again. I’m just a bit of a rubber ball. I just bounce back.

Plays are painful. But the very act of writing is a basic freedom denied some women. Some would call it a privilege. So what’s a little pain?

I was never cool as a kid.

I love the intimacy of TV. I love the fact that you don’t necessarily have the pressure of an audience or anyone around watching it – just you and it.

I think there is a difference between connecting with a character and supporting and believing their policies.

My mother came to see me in a play when I was a student, and afterwards, I asked her what she thought. She said, ‘Honest opinion? No.’

I had a huge interior world as a kid: I’d sit on endless wet holidays in Cornwall playing with paper dolls.

I like bowling with my kids at Shoreditch House.

I wrote a play for Miu Miu called ‘The Moment Is the Present, That’s Why It’s Called a Gift.’ Instead of doing a catwalk show, all the actors wore the clothes and performed a 20-minute play.

Having a daughter has reawakened my sense of feminism. I want to protect her.

You can’t control how an audience responds to something. It’s up to them.

London does two things for me: it makes me feel connected, and it also makes me feel very isolated and quite lonely at times, and that’s someone with two children in their family.

I don’t really read that many magazines; I’m more of a browser. I get ‘Vanity Fair’ quite often if I’m on a train.

To be honest, if I was going to have any kind of fantasy, be it left-wing or otherwise, it wouldn’t involve Margaret Thatcher.

I think film and television – particularly film – you are very isolated as a writer. If you’re lucky, you have a good relationship with the director. Then you do make that development and come on set and be part of something. But ultimately, your work is kind of done by the time you come on set.

I love the South Bank: every era of architecture is there, and you can stop, look, and listen.

I try to stay focused on the work and recognize that I’ve been very lucky. Maybe it’s ’cause I grew up with actors, but I’ve seen that recognition comes and goes, so all there really is is your family and friends. You have to maintain those constants in your life. Maintain what’s beyond your work.

I’m a writer of fiction. I try to write about my time, but it’s dangerous if I’m seen as an investigative writer. I manipulate and change and control.

I talk to myself all the time – it’s something my children have observed in the car.

I never get writer’s block, but I do have days where I crawl under the duvet.

I think casting is everything. You get a great cast and – certainly, as happens in ‘The Hour’ – so many of those performances on the page were transformed by those actors who took those parts and made it into something completely different.

The older I get, the more I have to think long and hard about what I need to say and why.

I am always running away from something.

I don’t look back. I don’t look forward. I am totally now.

I work from about 8:30 A.M. until 7 P.M., five days a week, when I’m not sneaking off to buy another bar of chocolate.

The world can make you very angry.

‘Tender’ is my most strongly autobiographical play.

My parents’ divorce was very difficult. Divorce is essentially incredibly painful, but it’s also an essential part of life.

I’m so straight and boring, really. I have two kids and a very nice partner.

I used to listen to ‘Woman’s Hour’ every morning, but I’ve discovered that I can’t have words on when I’m working.

When people say to me, ‘You’re so prolific!’ it’s, like, no, I’m just hopeless with money.

Chaos is my natural habitat. I write about chaotic situations and about people finding their way through the chaos, the hope that you can find your way.

I understand this fear of the word ‘feminism,’ and I understand the fear of saying it because it becomes as divisive as ‘sexism’ has become. But I know a lot of male feminists.

Good writing is often about trying to investigate something you feel is missing and trying to put it back.

Yes, I’ve heard of the ‘Mad Men’ comparisons, but I like to think ‘The Hour’ has its own distinctive voice. Although it is set in 1956, I have tried to give it a contemporary edge, and its themes of love, passion, romance, fury, professional jealousy, and personal failure are universal, I think.

Journalism and the news has become not only a means to debate but also to judge and deconstruct celebrity, the news story, and the emotional lives of political people.

The joy for me as a writer is that, despite the fact I spend most of my life on my own in a room eating too much chocolate and drinking too much tea, eventually they let me out into the world.

Feminism isn’t just for women. It’s for men.

There are so many actresses I want to write for. I see them, and I think, ‘Why is she not playing that lead? What’s happened to that actress?’ I think all I can do is to write parts for women, to say, ‘Keep going, keep acting, because there are parts for you. There will be those plays.’

Writing a film is like giving birth to a baby and then giving it up for adoption.

‘The Iron Lady’ is not a biopic. Phyllida Lloyd and Meryl Streep coined it ‘King Lear for girls.’

I’m a woman, and I’m interested in writing stories from a female perspective.

I always felt a bit of a nerd, but my family gets me and my oddities. My kids and partner are way cooler than I am, but they let me in the room with them.

Of all the mediums, theatre is the one where you really need to have something to say – because it’s just you, the words, and the space.

Usually when I write a movie, I’m lucky if I get one good actress.

Having worked on ‘The Hour,’ I now feel like I spend my whole time interrogating history.

I am the most tense, annoying person in the world.

I definitely people-watch. I often see photos of myself with my children: I’m always in the background with my mouth wide open, looking somewhere else.