Quotes from Peter Morgan

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.

It is a fairly serious thing that you're doing if you're writing about people who are still alive and who still have a role in public life. Sometimes you don't want to be reminded too much of the responsibility.

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.

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 first and primary requirement for me in a director that I'd want to work with is: do they love writing, and do they love the collaboration process with writers?

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.

I do have an innate understanding of where a story should or shouldn't go, in a way that I don't think can be taught.

You can be far more challenging, articulate and intelligent writing for television than you can writing for the cinema.

There is no inherent contradiction between being right-wing and being intelligent.

I am drawn to characters so full of internal contradictions. Idi Amin was one. I loved writing him.

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

I just feel that if I'm English and writing about an American president, I have got to have someone on my side who can help me out when I'm lapsing into lazy or obvious European skepticism.

When you make a choice as a writer about what it is you want to write, and what it is you're going to spend six months thinking about, you have to fall in love.

The irony of what I do is that the more you reveal someone in their frailties and shortcomings, the more we feel drawn to them and forgiving we feel of them.

In a way, I think of the press as my colleagues. I don't want to throw hand grenades at people who do something that's pretty similar to what I do. But at the same time, we all need to take ourselves seriously and be responsible as professionals. And there was a collective failure in the treatment of Christopher Jefferies.

I can't help slightly falling in love with every character I write about. And I quite like writing about people who are vilified.

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

For a younger generation to imagine a time where there was no security at airports - going around the world in the bar of a jumbo jet, 'Tell the plane to wait, I'm running late!' - there is something very Austin Powers about David Frost, a man who, in all seriousness, would approach women in a safari suit, with sideburns.

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.

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

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.

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?'

It was so interesting to discover Nixon was a Californian. I always think Nixon should come from a cold place.

Self-destruction is such an interesting thing for a dramatist, and what's particular to Nixon is how human the failings were that led to his downfall.