Most good work is a combination of parts you love and parts you could do better. My constant mantra is, ‘Next time, next time, next time.’
Abi Morgan
I try to stay focused on the work and recognize that I’ve been very lucky. Maybe it’s ’cause I grew up with actors, but I’ve seen that recognition comes and goes, so all there really is is your family and friends. You have to maintain those constants in your life. Maintain what’s beyond your work.
Abi Morgan
I didn’t take into account the critical tsunami that comes with having work going out. I’ve gone from being a complete narcissist, someone who googles my own name, to someone who has to work separately from that to avoid creative paralysis.
Abi Morgan
I always say writing a play is like toothache: I find it incredibly painful, and it’s only once the play’s out that the pain is gone.
Abi Morgan
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.
Abi Morgan
Yes, I’ve heard of the ‘Mad Men’ comparisons, but I like to think ‘The Hour’ has its own distinctive voice. Although it is set in 1956, I have tried to give it a contemporary edge, and its themes of love, passion, romance, fury, professional jealousy, and personal failure are universal, I think.
Abi Morgan
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.’
Abi Morgan
I don’t really read that many magazines; I’m more of a browser. I get ‘Vanity Fair’ quite often if I’m on a train.
Abi Morgan
I think social media has reinvigorated people’s enthusiasm to be active and to engage.
Abi Morgan
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.
Abi Morgan
My mother came to see me in a play when I was a student, and afterwards, I asked her what she thought. She said, ‘Honest opinion? No.’
Abi Morgan
Of course I am aware that there is a level of sexism in any large institution, but I find, in television and film, most of the producers are women.
Abi Morgan
I never get writer’s block, but I do have days where I crawl under the duvet.
Abi Morgan
Even if you’ve been a coward all your life, death is a heroic act.
Abi Morgan
I think I’m always running away from somewhere, and to me, theatre’s always felt like a good place to run away to.
Abi Morgan
One of the things I think I can do in my lifetime is stop to remind myself that – and keep affirming that – women can sell movies.
Abi Morgan
Really, feminism is just about equality, and that’s all. It’s just saying equal rights.
Abi Morgan
I understand this fear of the word ‘feminism,’ and I understand the fear of saying it because it becomes as divisive as ‘sexism’ has become. But I know a lot of male feminists.
Abi Morgan
Feminism isn’t just for women. It’s for men.
Abi Morgan
I’m a writer of fiction. I try to write about my time, but it’s dangerous if I’m seen as an investigative writer. I manipulate and change and control.
Abi Morgan
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.
Abi Morgan
I can understand a family that’s imploding. I have experience of that in my own life.
Abi Morgan
Good writing is often about trying to investigate something you feel is missing and trying to put it back.
Abi Morgan
I spent most of the Seventies living in Newcastle-upon-Tyne and most of the Eighties living in Stoke-on-Trent.
Abi Morgan
Writing a film is like giving birth to a baby and then giving it up for adoption.
Abi Morgan
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.
Abi Morgan
I know what it’s like to be brought up by actors and writers.
Abi Morgan
I was never cool as a kid.
Abi Morgan
I think that, as a writer, while it’s your job to construct stories, you have to navigate your way through them with your heart.
Abi Morgan
I need to be in charge, and that comes from when I was growing up and money was always an issue. I didn’t want to feel the fear of poverty again, and I suppose, in that way, I qualify as Thatcher Youth.
Abi Morgan
I was a pretty heartbroken 13-year-old. That was the year my grandmother died and my parents split up.
Abi Morgan
I think theater is very much my natural home. But the truth is that the older I’ve got, and the more I’ve written film and television, I find it incredibly hard to write theater.
Abi Morgan
I think film and television – particularly film – you are very isolated as a writer. If you’re lucky, you have a good relationship with the director. Then you do make that development and come on set and be part of something. But ultimately, your work is kind of done by the time you come on set.
Abi Morgan
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.
Abi Morgan
I’m so straight and boring, really. I have two kids and a very nice partner.
Abi Morgan
I can go to the BBC and say, ‘OK, my next drama is for women, and it is diverse women.’ I take that to America, however, and I have another set of conversations.
Abi Morgan
I get the ‘Guardian’ delivered every day and read it very quickly. I like it for both the TV and theatre reviews and because it’s very accessible. At the weekend, I get the ‘Observer’ because I love the food supplement, Observer Food Monthly, and the style section. And I can’t resist the News of the World.
Abi Morgan
I’m the world’s worst at reading reviews and then pretending I’ve read the book.
Abi Morgan
I used to listen to ‘Woman’s Hour’ every morning, but I’ve discovered that I can’t have words on when I’m working.
Abi Morgan
Usually when I write a movie, I’m lucky if I get one good actress.
Abi Morgan
‘The Iron Lady’ is not a biopic. Phyllida Lloyd and Meryl Streep coined it ‘King Lear for girls.’
Abi Morgan
The joy for me as a writer is that, despite the fact I spend most of my life on my own in a room eating too much chocolate and drinking too much tea, eventually they let me out into the world.
Abi Morgan
I never know if I’m the builder or architect. The role shifts all the time. But what I have come to conclude is that the script is the muse.
Abi Morgan
Life experiences inherently change you as a writer. My sense of fury calmed down when I had children and found a loving partner.
Abi Morgan
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.
Abi Morgan
The older I get, the more I have to think long and hard about what I need to say and why.
Abi Morgan
Splendour’ broke through to new territory for me. It exposed my commitment to writing for women: my desire to recognise that they can be as aggressive, violent, mercurial, and complex as men.
Abi Morgan
I talk to myself all the time – it’s something my children have observed in the car.
Abi Morgan
I literally grew up in drama. I used to watch drama – the catharsis of the play – then see drama at home.
Abi Morgan
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.
Abi Morgan
I love the intimacy of TV. I love the fact that you don’t necessarily have the pressure of an audience or anyone around watching it – just you and it.
Abi Morgan
You can’t control how an audience responds to something. It’s up to them.
Abi Morgan