Quotes from Peter Morgan

I don't think I'm an unhappy person. It's just an intensity, not a depressive thing. It's just not having enough layers of skin. It's exhausting.

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.

Every dramatist will tell you that they know deep down what happened in the course of making that film and to what degree they took steps that were convenient and to what degree they took steps in telling their story that were dishonest. You know in your heart of hearts.

Belief in God is so deranged that it makes absolutely no sense, but it holds people together somehow.

Truth is an illusory notion.

Sometimes if biography is too head-on, it can feel too obvious.

Nixon had lists upon lists upon lists. They were tragic lists saying, 'Smile more,' or, 'Be stronger - remember, it is your job to spiritually uplift the nation.' This understanding of his limitations is heartbreaking.

I'm quick to be upset. My feelings are close to the surface. There is not much gap between a thought and a feeling with me. It makes it difficult for some people. I feel too much.

Robert Bolt's storytelling is the kind that I grew up with and aspired to.

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

I'm very happy for others to engage in conjecture, but if I was ever conscious of what I'm thinking about when I'm writing, oh my God, I'd be totally lost.

No family is complete without an embarrassing uncle.

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

By nature of the job, most actors are striking, remarkable, and alpha.

There are many, many things in my work that need redoing - never the structure.

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

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.

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

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.

Ambition interests me because it's such a surefire indicator of damage.

Jim Reston: Walking through the crowds of air-kissing politicians, actors and high fliers, it was tough to tell where the politics stopped and the showbiz started. Maybe, in the end, there is no difference.

Jim Reston: And of course when that moment came--no words came to my mouth, and I shook his hand. Because if you've spent that long hating a man--in the end--a kind of relationship develops. An intimacy. Biographer and subject. Assassin and target.

David Frost: It's all right. He wants me to do this. To finish him off. John Birt: What? David Frost: He wants the wilderness.

James Reston, Jr.: You know the first and greatest sin of the deception of television is that it simplifies; it diminishes, great complex ideas, stretches of time; whole careers become reduced to a single snapshot.