Quotes from Michaela Coel

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

When I think of the things that I want to write, I can never say them out loud because I know how crazy they sound. I know what things sound like when you haven't actually worked on the script, so I don't go around saying some of these ideas because they just sound awful.

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.

Comedy in the past hasn't spoken to women because it wasn't written by women, and male writers don't make women three-dimensional characters. Too often, women just facilitate the man's comedy: they're not crazy; they're not funny. But women are as vulgar as they are elegant, as stinky as they are smelling of eau de parfum.

One thing I am quite passionate about is the absence of dark-skinned women in the media, so I have a passion to show dark-skinned women as beautiful, as vulnerable, as people who can be sexually desired and loving people, because it is never really seen on TV.

We can put fear of the future in front of us to block us, or behind us to drive us forward. I feel like telling all the people who look like me to start trying to write. You don't know it's possible because it's not often in front of you.

I've been bullied about my appearance since forever.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

When I grew up, my race was not a thing. My identity was in my class. It was not about colour on my estate.

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.

Don't sit there and complain. Rub your hands together and figure out what to do.

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.

I wanted to write a show about an estate that wasn't sad or morbid, like a lot of shows portray working class life to be.

I don't actually believe in the genre of comedy. Sometimes when I watch comedies, I can't see the soul of the show. I want to be able to laugh and cry. That is where the magic is. I'm trying to get to that place.

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.'

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.

Women are tired of 'presenting' themselves; we just want to be who we are.

I do like making people feel uncomfortable - it's separating the wheat from the chaff.

Black isn't something I became after a car crash that I've been dealing with ever since. I'd like the colour of my skin to not be a factor in my life at all.

The idea of wanting to do something that's completely natural and then having to repress it is something that I find fascinating.