Quotes from Michaela Coel

I actually thank God for television... it's not technology, it's storytelling. Technology is saying, 'Do less, do less, do less.' And I don't think it's healthy, no.

What was nice for me was that when I got to secondary school - like high school - I met many other Ghanaian schoolgirls whose parents were also born in Ghana and were raising them here. We automatically had a huge kinship that was amazing.

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.

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

I feel that when you want to start attacking people or completely rejecting the people you see as not on the godly side, to me, that isn't God, and that isn't love.

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.

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?'

Inequality starts in the womb.

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.

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.

The first time I got into astrology was being in New York. I was like, 'Oh, this is a real thing here!' Now, I'll Google what your sign is and what my sign is to see the predictions of friendship, and I find that really cool. But that's the most I know.

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.

I believe there are some great things that I've taken from the Bible in terms of loving the world and trying to be kind. There are a lot of good things to take from the Bible, and I like to think I try to apply them to my life.

'Chewing Gum' is kind of like the world I wish I grew up in. There wasn't really a sense of community growing up.

Now I'm steeped in this world, I keep thinking going to the theatre every week is normal, but there's a whole world of people who don't go at all. I wrote 'Chewing Gum Dreams' for them - I'd love them to come.

I've always liked using humor, but what I had to with 'Chewing Gum' was take out a lot of darkness so it would be a bit more feel-good.

'Chewing Gum' is the London that I know.

There's Psalms that tell you things that nobody tells you - that you're fearfully and wonderfully made, that you're beautiful, that you have worth, basically.

I took what I was given in Christianity and put it into my secular, hedonistic life.

In Britain, we need to start presenting the option of being a writer in front of black women. We need to present the idea of being a writer into poorer communities because the majority of black people in this country are working class. We need to let working-class people know that their voices are important.

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.

'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.

In drama school, they do these big shows and period dramas, and I felt that none of those shows were representing me as a person, and I knew I wouldn't be cast in any of those when I left school. I decided to write my own one-woman show, and that was called 'Chewing Gum Dreams.'

Twitter is just full of silly little people enjoying being sarcastic and rude and mocking.