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Free Literature Study Guides
The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Free Literature Study Guides
The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Peter Morgan Quotes

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

– Peter Morgan

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

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

– Peter Morgan

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

– Peter Morgan

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

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

– Peter Morgan

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

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

– Peter Morgan

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

– Peter Morgan

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

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

– Peter Morgan

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

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

– Peter Morgan

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

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

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

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

– Peter Morgan

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

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

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