Sometimes if biography is too head-on, it can feel too obvious.

Belief in God is so deranged that it makes absolutely no sense, but it holds people together somehow.

Authorised royal biographers are so straitjacketed, deferential, fawning, and unadventurous that they can only be after a knighthood. Or they're completely scurrilous and insolent, like Andrew Morton or Paul Burrell.

I insist to this day that if you read the screenplay to 'The Queen,' it leaves you in no doubt that we considered her an isolated, out-of-touch, cold, emotionally inaccessible, overprivileged, deluded woman, heading an institution that should immediately be dismantled in any free and fair society.

If you start to analyze what you do, it can paralyze you.

I'm very happy for others to engage in conjecture, but if I was ever conscious of what I'm thinking about when I'm writing, oh my God, I'd be totally lost.

I make a point of not reading reviews because of the old adage, if you read the good ones then you have to read the bad ones, and if you read the bad ones, you have to, you know... And also because it's a very, very bewildering and exposing thing.

Truth is an illusory notion.

For 'Frost/Nixon,' everyone I spoke to told the story their way. Even people in the room tell different versions. There's no one truth about what happened in those interviews, so I feel very relaxed about bringing my imagination to the piece. God knows everyone else has.

I can't help slightly falling in love with every character I write about. And I quite like writing about people who are vilified.

Some of the things I have written about are a way of connecting with my father - I know he knew who Idi Amin was, and I know he knew who Longford was. And I know he knew who Nixon was, because shortly before he died, I talked to him about Watergate.

It is devastating, losing a parent. I don't really know what the effect is, but I suppose people might call me an ambitious man, and I'd say that an ambitious man is a damaged man.

For 'Frost/Nixon,' I had eight people who were present at those interviews - they were all in the room - and when I interviewed each of them, they had a totally different narrative of events, to the degree where you thought, 'Were you all really in the same room?'

Most historians are engaged in fiction.

My experience is, I do a table reading, and it's literally like it's written in colossal neon lights what's wrong with the screenplay.

It is a fairly serious thing that you're doing if you're writing about people who are still alive and who still have a role in public life. Sometimes you don't want to be reminded too much of the responsibility.

Most of the things I write, I write on spec. And because I write them on spec, there's less interference. Because there's less interference, they tend to be better.

I prefer my writing to do all the talking for me.

I can't imagine anyone thinking, 'Oh good, it's awards season!'

I just feel that if I'm English and writing about an American president, I have got to have someone on my side who can help me out when I'm lapsing into lazy or obvious European skepticism.

I can't relax when I'm watching a biographical drama because it's so close to what it is that I do that I just long for more fiction - so that I can switch off.

There are so many projects that I've written and had to abort because either I felt too distressed by what I was doing to the people who I was writing about, or they couldn't cope with it because their view of themselves was so far removed from reality.

I wrote a draft of 'Playboy' for Warner Brothers, and it was impossible to really be independent of Hugh Hefner. In the end, Hugh Hefner was unable to take the back seat required to be able to write something about him that I felt I could do.

I'm constantly having to check my conscience about what I'm writing and the responsibility of what I'm saying.

As a European from a different, younger generation, the trauma that was Nixon's presidency never really had a hold over me. For one thing, I never voted for him.

Barack Obama winning the election had an instant impact on everything - race relations, national self-esteem, tolerance. It also had an instant affect on 'Frost/Nixon.' At a stroke, instead of being a piece that reminded people of the agony they were in, it became an uplifting message about the agony they had escaped.

In some shape or form, we do have an emotional connection to our head of state, even if, for the most part, they seem very remote.

Most leading actresses have this energy, this 'Look at me. Here I am.' They're powerful; they're beautiful.

You can't ask someone to act middle-aged. Someone has to bring their own fatigue to it.

There's something about the soul of a country that is somehow connected to the head of state.

Sometimes it's okay for an audience not to understand everything that's going on.

As historians write more and more histories, it's a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy that other historians read their histories and then make synthesis, and certain things just get forgotten and left out and neglected.

Robert Bolt's storytelling is the kind that I grew up with and aspired to.

The films of which I'm most proud I've written are the ones that pivot on forgiveness.

The only exercise I take is walking behind the coffins of friends who took exercise.

I'm not an actor, I'm a movie star.

It's my job, it's what I do, it's what I'm on earth to do and it's who I am.

I will not be a common man. I will stir the smooth sands of monotony.

Always a bridesmaid never a bride my foot!

I have unqualified admiration for Brad Pitt.

I woke up one morning to find I was famous. I bought a white Rolls-Royce and drove down Sunset Boulevard, wearing dark specs and a white suit, waving like the Queen Mum.

My dear sir, it haunted me for the rest of my life.

There's always a hunger, when you're young, to go from peak to peak and avoid the valleys.

We were doing it under the most extraordinary circumstances, but the first out of the tent in the morning would be David Lean. He said to me on the very first day of shooting, Pete, this is the beginning of a great adventure.

If you can't do something willingly and joyfully, then don't do it.

I'm the most gregarious of men and love good company, but never less alone when alone.

I never found it easy to learn my lines. It was slog, slog, slog.

Films were never in my budget. Didn't occur to me till much later. I hoped for a long, good life, which I've had and I'm having as an actor. I didn't expect the rest.

I've done everything that's possible to be done.

Pope Paul III was the greatest thief in the history of the church.