165 Quotes by Peter Morgan

Jim Reston: Walking through the crowds of air-kissing politicians, actors and high fliers, it was tough to tell where the politics stopped and the showbiz started. Maybe, in the end, there is no difference.

Jim Reston: And of course when that moment came--no words came to my mouth, and I shook his hand. Because if you've spent that long hating a man--in the end--a kind of relationship develops. An intimacy. Biographer and subject. Assassin and target.

Ambition interests me because it’s such a surefire indicator of damage.

James Reston, Jr.: You know the first and greatest sin of the deception of television is that it simplifies; it diminishes, great complex ideas, stretches of time; whole careers become reduced to a single snapshot.

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.

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.

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

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.

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