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" When I started writing the screenplay for 'The Queen,' about the aftermath of the death of Princess Diana, both Stephen Frears, the director, and Andy Harries, the producer, begged me not to put Tony Blair in it. "

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" It's madness to hand in a script to a director, leave them alone, and for the director not to want the writer there with rehearsals and the shoot. "

Peter Morgan

Leave

Madness

Want

" There's nothing wrong with anybody from any other country having a perspective on the British royal family. It would be interesting. But I just doubt that they would get the dialogue right. "

" I don't understand and don't enjoy sci-fi, and it's just that if people aren't real, and they don't live in a real and recognizable society, I don't understand what to do. "

" 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. "

Peter Morgan

Self-Awareness

Think

" 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. "

" You can't ask someone to act middle-aged. Someone has to bring their own fatigue to it. "

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

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

" I watch drama on DVD because I can't stand ad breaks. "

Peter Morgan

Because

Breaks

" There are so many projects that I've written and had to abort because either I felt too distressed by what I was doing to the people who I was writing about, or they couldn't cope with it because their view of themselves was so far removed from reality. "

" 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. "

Peter Morgan

Write

Forgotten

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

" There were a couple of things I lost sleep over with the play 'Frost/Nixon,' so I went back and addressed them a bit more in the film. "

" Most leading actresses have this energy, this 'Look at me. Here I am.' They're powerful; they're beautiful. "

Peter Morgan

Energy

Beautiful

" I don't think of the crown as this glamorous thing. It's this murderous, bejeweled thing, the crown. "

" 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. "

" I'm very happy for others to engage in conjecture, but if I was ever conscious of what I'm thinking about when I'm writing, oh my God, I'd be totally lost. "

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

Peter Morgan

Heat

Peaceful

" 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. "

" Belief in God is so deranged that it makes absolutely no sense, but it holds people together somehow. "

" For 'Frost/Nixon,' everyone I spoke to told the story their way. Even people in the room tell different versions. There's no one truth about what happened in those interviews, so I feel very relaxed about bringing my imagination to the piece. God knows everyone else has. "

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

Peter Morgan

Storytelling

Kind

" 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. "

" If you don't belong somewhere, that outsider status you have gives you perspective. Of course, another word for outsider is 'exile,' and that's not fun at all. "

" 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 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. "

" Generally, I read nonfiction. There's very little fiction that I enjoy enough to spend my time reading. I am generally a nonfiction guy. "

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

" 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. "

" 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?' "