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

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

" If you think about what you do, if you become self-conscious about it, you've got to be very careful. Because I really like to write without self-awareness of what I'm doing. "

" The first and primary requirement for me in a director that I'd want to work with is: do they love writing, and do they love the collaboration process with writers? "

" 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?' "

" Truth is an illusory notion. "

" There are many, many things in my work that need redoing - never the structure. "

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

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

" 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. "

" For a younger generation to imagine a time where there was no security at airports - going around the world in the bar of a jumbo jet, 'Tell the plane to wait, I'm running late!' - there is something very Austin Powers about David Frost, a man who, in all seriousness, would approach women in a safari suit, with sideburns. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

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

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

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

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

" Self-destruction is such an interesting thing for a dramatist, and what's particular to Nixon is how human the failings were that led to his downfall. "

" 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.' "

" 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. "

" I think I stumbled upon a voice people associate with me with 'The Deal.' "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "