Peter Morgan quotes:

Having a phone call from Steven Spielberg was just a fantastic rite of passage. I loved it, and he was very focused, very likable, strictly business, and really sharp.

People test movies within an inch of their life so that the entire audience experience is a uniform one.

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

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

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

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

As a child, I grew up the son of German immigrant parents, so I grew up being teased and called 'Fritz' at school. When I married my wife and went to live in Vienna, I was teased for being a Brit.

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.

The minute you become a leader of a country, you go into a very small club. You join that sort of pantheon of other world leaders.

As we go through life our relationship with our own mortality and our inevitable demise increases.

I just try and do something good. But as a writer, you're slightly out of control.

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

A 20-year-old is never going to give death a second thought, whereas someone in their late 50s is going to think about it... I don't know, 20 times a day.

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.

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

Firms are a bit concerned about things like oil prices and US growth but actually the change (in firms expectations) is quite small so I think broadly theyre looking for more of the same,

I don't want to direct. I have no directing ambition whatsoever. And as long as I meet filmmakers like Tom Hooper, Stephen Frears, and others who allow that collaboration, I can't see why I would ever want to direct.

If you're growing up in times of peace and live in a country where there's plenty of food and good healthcare, you grow up without any relationship with death.

I'm not good at fantasy, no. I have been offered stuff, and I can't get my head around it.

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.

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

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

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.

I give everything my best shot and sometimes it doesn't work out and other times it works out much better than you thought.

I had no intention of providing any answers or solutions, because you'd only look a fool, but I did want to talk about what it's like to be in a state where you're wondering. And perhaps I was also receptive to the fact I was entering middle age and those thoughts come - to pretend that they don't come is just crazy.

I never go back over something I've done and I never watch them again.

I'm always pre-occupied with what it is that I'm doing at the moment.

It might be more difficult because you haven't got a book or a prop, but for the most part I like to write unpaid... initially and my own stories.

It's really a lovely feeling to write knowing that failure is taken off the table because if it's bad you just never show it to anyone.

People test movies within an inch of their life, so that the entire audience experience is a uniform one.

Sometimes you are lucky enough to get offered things and there is no rhyme or reason.

The stuff that I have perhaps become known for that's based on fact, and English statesmen shouting at each other all the time, doesn't entirely represent who I am. I am not a politics wonk.

The thing that I'm most in love with is the thing that I'm writing at the moment.

There are so many other people involved in the making of a play or a television series or whatever... even if you're a novelist there's so much in just the marketing of a book, or even the time... the zeitgeist, the moment at which it comes out. There's a lot you can't control.

There's no way of telling why you want to do things beforehand. Something just grabs you. It might not grab you six months later, and it might not have grabbed you six months before, but at that particular moment it grabs you, so you jump on it.

To what degree are historians chroniclers of the truth and to what degree are they just novelists, frankly?

We give each other a wide berth even if we have the flu, let alone... So, I think that's part of the stigma that people who have diseases suffer. It's almost infectious... if somebody is closer to death, they're almost a bad omen and I think that's terrible.

You don't really work together with Clint Eastwood. I mean, he takes the script and he shoots it - and he shoots it very faithfully.

You're working with other people and sometimes it doesn't work out the way you want, and sometimes you didn't realise what a mistake you've made until you see it projected.

You can only do the best you can in the minute that you're doing it.