Abi Morgan Quotes

From the very beginning, history wasn't content simply to be nostalgic fairytales; it wanted to make you think.

See, I have no journalism in my background, so I wasn't practised at research or writing non-fiction, nor at handling the truth in a journalistic way. Journalists know when to call a halt and write something, but I kept on looking for answers.

Every time I've had to do journalistic investigations, I've cursed, but later I discovered that it had helped me enormously with writing fiction. It's the one thing that can save me from becoming an academic writer.

Not everyone realises that to write a really good piece of journalism is at least as demanding intellectually as the achievement of any scholar.

People often talk about parachute journalism, but one of the skills that you get when you are a correspondent is the ability to look at facts fast and work out what the story is.

If you wanna write non-fiction you have to be interested in the world.

Great questions make great reporting.

We are all affected by the time we are born into, and of course that feeds into your work. Society is based on storytelling - religious myths, opera, film - and 1968 was always seen as a time of rupture and fragmentation. I have always been interested in those words.

Most reporters are so transactional rather than strategic.

Then I found books that were written much later, as late as 15 years ago. It was very superficial material, but enough to tell me that the genesis of this story was worth exploring.

From journalism I learned to write under pressure, to work with deadlines, to have limited space and time, to conduct and interview, to find information, to research, and above all, to use language as efficiently as possible and to remember always that there is a reader out there.

I understand the difference between journalism and scholarship that comes 20 years later.

I never believed the anchorman should be the know-it-all. And I try to communicate that to the audience. While I have some knowledge from my years of experience, what I want to do is walk you through this because we're all walking through this together.

We must admit that history is enjoyable to a large extent because it enables us to pass judgement on the past.

And my interest in history was, and remains, very strong: what I wanted was to understand certain things better by understanding them psychoanalytically.

I had been writing for about twelve years. I knew pretty well how you could find things out, but I had never been trained in an academic way how to go about the research.

When I was there, something clicked in my head; I found myself interviewing people, searching out facts and figures. Later on I became much more self-conscious of what I was doing.

I love history because when you strip away the social and political aspects, it's really just a bunch of fun stories.

I thought journalism would enable me to be a mile wide and an inch deep.

At the end of the day, there is still one function of journalism that cannot be computerized, and that is reporters. You're always going to need reporters.

I think everyone has their own style in journalism. Look, I'm a girl from the South! Sometimes I laugh. Someone can pejoratively call it giggling. But if you look at the body of my work, I ask lots of hard questions and break a lot of hard news.

When you do 'Mad Fat Diary' or 'The Village,' you always learn about the particular time period, and that's always nice for an actor.

I never put out a history, I put out a dramatic history.

Reporters have to use their imagination, really put themselves in the shoes of the person they want to interview.

No ideas and the ability to express them - that's a journalist.