Quotes

Eddie Marsan is just my favourite actor of all time. I love everything he's been in, so it's a dream come true to work with him.

I always deeply admire people who can stay still in a room and wait for people to come to them.

If you want to fit in, you try to mirror whatever anyone wants from you.

As a writer, you're not even at the party when you work in film. At best, you're the one laying out the canapes.

It's quite good when you fall flat on your bum on a creative level. Critics can hate what I do, or I've got something completely wrong, and it's good because that ego thing gets zapped for a while.

I used to believe in God as a child. God, for me, was linked with hope.

The thing I love about London is that it is filled with migrants, including myself.

I don't look back. I don't look forward. I am totally now.

I'd love to know what the future looks like.

I am the most tense, annoying person in the world.

I got dumped off 'The Iron Lady' a month before they started shooting, and then they brought two new writers on. Then I was brought back on again. I'm just a bit of a rubber ball. I just bounce back.

When people say to me, 'You're so prolific!' it's, like, no, I'm just hopeless with money.

All work is a process of failure. Every single thing I write, I look at it and go, 'Do better. That's not good enough. Do better.' And so, that keeps me up at night.

I work from about 8:30 A.M. until 7 P.M., five days a week, when I'm not sneaking off to buy another bar of chocolate.

Cornelia Parker has inspired a lot of my theatre work. Her art is about points of impact: it's poetic but with a strong literal story.

I had a huge interior world as a kid: I'd sit on endless wet holidays in Cornwall playing with paper dolls.

Plays are the marathon of scriptwriting. You fix on a point somewhere in the middle distance, and you start running, and you don't stop until you get to the end. The theory is that you have something you cannot not say: this is the engine that propels you through to the last page.

Plays are painful. But the very act of writing is a basic freedom denied some women. Some would call it a privilege. So what's a little pain?

I still always think the greatest moment for me, as a writer, is when I press that button and send the first draft of the script.

I think, in some ways, there's a point as a television writer that 'executive producer' is the natural credit you get, and it can be a vanity title, or you can make of it what you want.

I think casting is everything. You get a great cast and - certainly, as happens in 'The Hour' - so many of those performances on the page were transformed by those actors who took those parts and made it into something completely different.

If the world is in complete flux for me and life is falling apart, if I just manage to get myself in front of a computer or at my desk, it calms.

I'm a woman, and I'm interested in writing stories from a female perspective.

When you see in this country and every other part of the world the huge pay disparity - in Hollywood, in every profession in the U.K., globally - and you see what is happening to women in every country socially and culturally, you can't not be a feminist.

There are so many actresses I want to write for. I see them, and I think, 'Why is she not playing that lead? What's happened to that actress?' I think all I can do is to write parts for women, to say, 'Keep going, keep acting, because there are parts for you. There will be those plays.'