Peter Morgan Quotes

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

Peter Morgan

#2. 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.

Peter Morgan

#3. Once I start writing about somebody, I become very protective of them.

Peter Morgan

#4. 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.

Peter Morgan

#5. There's no way of telling why you want to do things beforehand. Something just grabs you. It might not grab you six months later, and it might not have grabbed you six months before, but at that particular moment it grabs you, so you jump on it.

Peter Morgan

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

Peter Morgan

#7. I'm not an artist, and I want to take risks, and when the possibility of failure occurs, it's because the idea is all exciting or interesting as a high wire act, and sometimes you've got to fall off, just by virtue of the fact that you're constantly trying to evolve and do new things.

Peter Morgan

#8. We give each other a wide berth even if we have the flu, let alone ... So, I think that's part of the stigma that people who have diseases suffer. It's almost infectious ... if somebody is closer to death, they're almost a bad omen and I think that's terrible.

Peter Morgan

#9. There are people who are bound journalistically to a code of ethics that means they can't quote something that isn't sourced, whereas what I do is entirely unsourced. I effectively fictionalise history and yet somehow aim at a greater truth.

Peter Morgan

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

Peter Morgan

#11. You can only do the best you can in the minute that you're doing it.

Peter Morgan

#12. There are so many other people involved in the making of a play or a television series or whatever ... even if you're a novelist there's so much in just the marketing of a book, or even the time ... the zeitgeist, the moment at which it comes out. There's a lot you can't control.

Peter Morgan

#13. I just try and do something good. But as a writer, you're slightly out of control.

Peter Morgan

#14. Having a phone call from Steven Spielberg was just a fantastic rite of passage. I loved it, and he was very focused, very likable, strictly business, and really sharp.

Peter Morgan

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

Peter Morgan

#16. 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.

Peter Morgan

#17. As we go through life our relationship with our own mortality and our inevitable demise increases.

Peter Morgan

#18. I don't understand and don't enjoy sci-fi, and it's just that if people aren't real, and they don't live in a real and recognizable society, I don't understand what to do.

Peter Morgan

#19. Sometimes you are lucky enough to get offered things and there is no rhyme or reason.

Peter Morgan

#20. I never go back over something I've done and I never watch them again.

Peter Morgan

#21. Generally, I read nonfiction. There's very little fiction that I enjoy enough to spend my time reading. I am generally a nonfiction guy.

Peter Morgan

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

Peter Morgan

#23. I have no directing ambition whatsoever. And as long as I meet filmmakers like Tom Hooper, Stephen Frears, and others who allow that collaboration, I can't see why I would ever want to direct.

Peter Morgan

#24. 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.

Peter Morgan

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

Peter Morgan

#26. I'm always pre-occupied with what it is that I'm doing at the moment.

Peter Morgan

#27. People test movies within an inch of their life so that the entire audience experience is a uniform one.

Peter Morgan

#28. 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.

Peter Morgan

#29. I am not a politics wonk. I like the idea of my writing reflecting more about who I am or other people.

Peter Morgan

#30. It's madness to hand in a script to a director, leave them alone, and for the director not to want the writer there with rehearsals and the shoot.

Peter Morgan

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

Peter Morgan

#32. A 20-year-old is never going to give death a second thought, whereas someone in their late 50s is going to think about it ... I don't know, 20 times a day.

Peter Morgan

#33. It's really a lovely feeling to write knowing that failure is taken off the table because if it's bad you just never show it to anyone.

Peter Morgan

#34. I can't relax when I'm watching a biographical drama, because it's so close to what it is that I do that I just long for more fiction - so that I can switch off.

Peter Morgan

#35. Firms are a bit concerned about things like oil prices and US growth but actually the change (in firms expectations) is quite small so I think broadly theyre looking for more of the same,

Peter Morgan

#36. It might be more difficult because you haven't got a book or a prop, but for the most part I like to write unpaid ... initially and my own stories.

Peter Morgan

#37. 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.

Peter Morgan

#38. If you're growing up in times of peace and live in a country where there's plenty of food and good healthcare, you grow up without any relationship with death.

Peter Morgan

#39. I actually speak fluent German. And I live in Vienna, and I'm married to a Viennese woman.

Peter Morgan

#40. You're either a person with a conscience, or you're not. I think I've got quite a fine conscience.

Peter Morgan

#41. 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.

Peter Morgan

#42. 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.

Peter Morgan

#43. To what degree are historians chroniclers of the truth and to what degree are they just novelists, frankly?

Peter Morgan

#44. 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.

Peter Morgan

#45. As a child, I grew up the son of German immigrant parents, so I grew up being teased and called 'Fritz' at school. When I married my wife and went to live in Vienna, I was teased for being a Brit.

Peter Morgan

#46. 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?

Peter Morgan

#47. I wrote 'Hereafter' quickly and without mapping it out too much or being too schematic. As an exercise, I think that was incredibly important.

Peter Morgan

#48. The real beauty in my professional experience has been friendships and collaborations with filmmakers.

Peter Morgan