Quotes from Jesse Armstrong

Most of us now have opinions on such things as road tolling, the U.S. position on climate change, and the correct colour of a newsreader's tie on the occasion of a state tragedy, which are way beyond the arena of things we have any control over.

This is the tragedy of the entrepreneur. They literally cannot slack off. That's why Alan Sugar looks so jowly, tired and angry, and Richard Branson so phonily, aggressively cheery.

There's a reason we have a lot of pomp and ceremony around coronations and the transfer of power in democracies. It's a scary moment. The rules aren't clear.

Standups always like the room cold, and if you're shooting a sitcom live you want it a little bit chilly for the audience. I don't know why - you'd have to ask a combination of an evolutionary psychologist and a building-maintenance man.

Sitcom characters, my writing partner Sam Bain and I sometimes tell each other, are not normally self-conscious. Or not quite. The best sitcom characters are probably just a little self-conscious. Deep enough to feel pain and humiliation, but shallow enough that there are no hidden depths.

As a writer you often watch things with a certain distance.. More often, you're worried that something that you have invented is going to become reality, and you'll look like you copied it.

In 2005, the Iraq war was entering its third year and no one believed that we were going to find WMDs any more. The prewar claims of their certain existence were becoming an embarrassing joke, a big present we'd been offered that was getting ever later in showing up.

You've only got so much plot, character and psychological capital. One day it will be gone and you don't know when that day is. The fear is that it'll sneak up on you when you're not looking.

I can't say I connected with many of my co-workers at Westminster. My MP's office was sandwiched between those of Peter Mandelson and Harriet Harman, but I never mixed with the important-looking young men and women who bustled in and out of their doors.

I love the breadth and space you get to explore character in so-called serialized TV, the novelistic element of maybe being able to find out who people are. But I also very much like the sitcom discipline of having a self-contained episode that you could conceivably, I hope, be able to enjoy in and of itself.

Under a government committed to cutting public services to the bone, the police are often left to clean up all sorts of untidy situations that are really social work or housing, mental and physical health issues.

Writing a sitcom compared with writing a novel is a bit like the difference between going on a big, noisy group holiday compared with a solitary march to the South Pole.

As a private individual, it's probably not worth having a foreign policy of your own at all. Not unless you own at least a small boat with which to try to effect it. Probably two boats is the minimum, actually. And a gun.

Far too interesting are times when you wake up to find that the tube line you take to work has been blown up and people you know might be dead. Not interesting enough are times when too much stuff about county cricket makes it on to the news pages.

If you're on your way to meet your maker, you are not, are you, going to stop en route for a foot-long tuna sub?

The truth is that when writing a TV show or a film you are a part of a team. And though you might be the architect who makes the initial drawings, somewhere along the line it all has to be given up, handed over. To the costume department and the actors, the art department, the director and the producers.

So often in TV you're looking at the monitor thinking, 'Oh, yeah, that sort of looks a bit like that other TV show that we're pretending to make.'

All the dramas I admire most - 'Six Feet Under,' 'The Sopranos' - even when the scenes aren't laugh-out-loud funny, per se, there's a comic twist that gives the stories an energy.

When you talk to police communications staff and think about their job from an insider's point of view, you can see they have to inch out along a razor's edge every day. They have a duty to be honest. But there's also a responsibility not to inflame.

When you're a nerd, you know there's a million types of neurotic self-loathing.

I was of that generation of NME-reading, indie fans. Part of the reason I went to Manchester was because of New Order and The Smiths. Growing up in the north west, it was where we aspired to go out.

It's a lucky kink for comedy writers that particular English obsession and interest with class and social difference. It maybe is not good for society but it's good for the comic writer.

Catch-22' is the big daddy of funny war novels. It's capacious and occasionally rambling. It's a bible of literate comedy: you can find anything you want inside - it's all in there.

Unlike many hour-long scripted American dramas, 'Succession' has very few standing sets.