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" I don't believe in comedy as a TV genre - I think there's drama that is funny. Because beyond the laughs, there has to be cost, and there has to be heart. "

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" When I grew up, my race was not a thing. My identity was in my class. It was not about colour on my estate. "

" I've been bullied about my appearance since forever. "

" I don't really go with the crowd. I'm the kind of person that if I heard some girls were bullying my friend in another school, I would go to that school by myself and try to have a fight with a hundred girls. "

" I've always liked using humor, but what I had to with 'Chewing Gum' was take out a lot of darkness so it would be a bit more feel-good. "

" At college, I became friends with this girl who was a 'cool Christian.' They did street dance, then they prayed. It became my whole world. I had Christian friends. I went to Christian parties. "

" To see people laughing or crying or listening, then being inspired to do their own thing? I can't think of anything better than that. "

" I see my shows like Gandhi, and I've got little baby Gandhis, and they are changing the world. I know that I'm a bit delusional about that, but I do think of them like Gandhi. They are not celebrities: they are like Gandhi and Mother Teresa. "

" I wrote a play at drama school, which was a dark comedy - people laughed and cried. And then my script of one of the shows was picked up by a comedy sketch company... so then I had to write comedy. "

" I want to make sure I'm climbing because there's no back-up. No one in my family has a house, and, regardless of your background, if someone has a house, that means you can always come back home. When you don't have that, it's like there isn't anywhere to stand, so you have to keep jumping. "

" The acting world is tough. It's competitive - and even more so for women - but actually, for black female actresses, the issue isn't really that it's competitive: it's that there just aren't enough roles for them in film and TV. "

" 'Chewing Gum' is a sitcom set on an estate in east London. Its central character is a girl from a Pentecostal background who decides to embark on a more worldly lifestyle - it's about adolescence 10 years too late. In my dreams, everybody is watching it, finding out about my world and realising it's not what they imagined. That it's not terrifying. "

" What was nice for me was that when I got to secondary school - like high school - I met many other Ghanaian schoolgirls whose parents were also born in Ghana and were raising them here. We automatically had a huge kinship that was amazing. "

" In comedy, I often see so many weird race jokes, and it's like, there is no racial diversity in your show to even make those race jokes. The problem is that there is no one in the back to say, 'Hey, that race joke is not really appropriate.' "

" I actually thank God for television... it's not technology, it's storytelling. Technology is saying, 'Do less, do less, do less.' And I don't think it's healthy, no. "

" I am really weird. "

" When you've got African parents, you go to uni, do finance, and go into accounting. But I'm not good with systems. I dropped out in my final year of college to become a Christian poet. Then went back to do my A-levels and went to uni in Birmingham to do political science and theology. I lasted 12 weeks. "

" The unpredictability of the weather, the increasing possibility of intelligence introducing a species more powerful than ours, the growing uncertainty that animals can or should be slaughtered for our pleasure, has led many of us to start asking more complex questions about what is and isn't normal. "

" I wanted to write a show about an estate that wasn't sad or morbid, like a lot of shows portray working class life to be. "

" One thing I am quite passionate about is the absence of dark-skinned women in the media, so I have a passion to show dark-skinned women as beautiful, as vulnerable, as people who can be sexually desired and loving people, because it is never really seen on TV. "

" I love Issa Rae. I adore her. "

" You have to be true to your instinctive way of writing. You have to find your identity. "

" In drama school, they do these big shows and period dramas, and I felt that none of those shows were representing me as a person, and I knew I wouldn't be cast in any of those when I left school. I decided to write my own one-woman show, and that was called 'Chewing Gum Dreams.' "

" What dominates my life isn't the fact that I started off doing theatre. It's probably to do with Christianity, my race, the class I was born into. These are the things that make my work. They make who I am as well. "

" Where I grew up, in Aldgate, east London, one of the poorest boroughs in the country, I saw lots that was real - the bankers with their briefcases, the man next door with five wives, the illegal immigrants in Flat 5. I'm from a world you rarely see on screen, and I want to show it off. "

" When I think of the things that I want to write, I can never say them out loud because I know how crazy they sound. I know what things sound like when you haven't actually worked on the script, so I don't go around saying some of these ideas because they just sound awful. "

" So many of my memories revolve around TV. "

" I have to go to sleep with music. "

" It strikes me as odd that we've made journeys with our social conditioning in certain areas, but not in others. The world is always changing; discoveries in technology and science relentlessly expose our dearest values as fictions. "

" Growing up on our estate, we were all different colours, but we were all really poor. I never really realised that black was a problem for some people. "

" I do like making people feel uncomfortable - it's separating the wheat from the chaff. "