Quotes from Abi Morgan

'Tender' is my most strongly autobiographical play.

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

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.

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.

If you're dealing with a powerful leader, you're inevitably going to have a dialogue with her political past. It was always my intention to interrogate Thatcher's political life.

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 think I'm always running away from somewhere, and to me, theatre's always felt like a good place to run away to.

Of all the mediums, theatre is the one where you really need to have something to say - because it's just you, the words, and the space.

London does two things for me: it makes me feel connected, and it also makes me feel very isolated and quite lonely at times, and that's someone with two children in their family.

Writing a film is like giving birth to a baby and then giving it up for adoption.

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.

Stage is the place of the playwright: you're guided by great actors and directors, but it's the playwright's word on the page that counts.

What's great about the way 'Shame''s been received is that I kept on thinking there's no way this film will be received well since I've had such a good time.

I hope my pieces have an authenticity to them, but my job is to filter the world and tell a story, not to define and recreate exactly what's going on.

Even if you've been a coward all your life, death is a heroic act.

Having worked on 'The Hour,' I now feel like I spend my whole time interrogating history.

To be honest, if I was going to have any kind of fantasy, be it left-wing or otherwise, it wouldn't involve Margaret Thatcher.

The process of re-writing and writing and re-writing means that you may have a brilliant phrase, but over time it distills and distorts and changes.

I'm the world's worst at reading reviews and then pretending I've read the book.

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

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

Usually when I write a movie, I'm lucky if I get one good actress.

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.

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.'