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" We need to encourage black women to know that they are authors of their own destiny, that they have important stories to tell, and that they are capable, so magically capable, of writing them and creating important pieces of work that will live forever in history. "

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" '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. "

Michaela Coel

" 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. "

Michaela Coel

" 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. "

Michaela Coel

" It was only when I went to sixth-form college that I encountered boys. "

Michaela Coel

" 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. "

Michaela Coel

" 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. "

Michaela Coel

" 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. "

Michaela Coel

" I don't know what it would have been like to grow up with a man in the house. "

Michaela Coel

" I love listening to audiobooks - I always lose my glasses, but if I have an audiobook, I don't need them. "

Michaela Coel

" 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. "

Michaela Coel

" Men are trained to like this version of womanhood, and when someone comes along smashing the table and messing up the party, it's a bit like, 'Get out; why are you disturbing the peace?' "

Michaela Coel

" 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. "

Michaela Coel

" 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.' "

Michaela Coel

" There always seems to be an element of faith in my writing. "

Michaela Coel

" So many of my memories revolve around TV. "

Michaela Coel

" I went to drama school, where you learn to clown around a bit. You're walking around in leotards every day for three years, and you're taught clowning and mask work. "

Michaela Coel

" 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. "

Michaela Coel

" 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. "

Michaela Coel

" Inequality starts in the womb. "

Michaela Coel

" I feel angry with myself the way I handled the Bible and Christianity. A lot more people are more normal with Christianity. I was crazy... telling people you will go to hell. I lost all my friends because of my militant faith. "

Michaela Coel

" 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. "

Michaela Coel

" 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. "

Michaela Coel

" My sets are not peaceful. It's a beautiful catastrophe. I am running around like a headless chicken. I don't sleep because I am writing. It's manic. "

Michaela Coel

" I don't think we should be presentable or present ourselves for the sake of others. "

Michaela Coel

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

Michaela Coel

" When I was 18, I suddenly became very, very religious. I became an evangelical Christian; I was celibate for five years. "

Michaela Coel

" I'm very rational, so sometimes I need the facts, and if I don't have the facts, then I get huffy, and I move on. "

Michaela Coel

" To suggest things may be going on in our brains that we aren't fully conscious of, that we unknowingly make classist, sexist and racist presumptions... Well, there just aren't many comfortable ways to take that. And in the face of discomfort comes the mask of defence. "

Michaela Coel

" I don't write with this thing in the back of my head about carrying the weight of young black women on my shoulders. "

Michaela Coel