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" 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. "

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" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" Truth is an illusory notion. "

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

" I'm not an artist, and I want to take risks, and when the possibility of failure occurs, it's because the idea is all exciting or interesting as a high wire act, and sometimes you've got to fall off, just by virtue of the fact that you're constantly trying to evolve and do new things. "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

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

" 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. "

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

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

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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 insist to this day that if you read the screenplay to 'The Queen,' it leaves you in no doubt that we considered her an isolated, out-of-touch, cold, emotionally inaccessible, overprivileged, deluded woman, heading an institution that should immediately be dismantled in any free and fair society. "

" 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. "

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

" 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 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. "