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

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.

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 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.

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 imagine anyone thinking, 'Oh good, it's awards season!'

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

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.

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.

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.

Most historians are engaged in fiction.

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?'

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.

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.

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

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.

Truth is an illusory notion.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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