Abi Morgan Quotes

I don't think of myself as a producer. In television, it's part of the business - if you progress and become successful as a writer, you're called a writer-producer. What that means is that you have a lot of say in casting and behind-the-scenes stuff. But I'm just a writer.

My role on 'Silicon Valley' was so small that I didn't have a lot of influence anyway in the show. There are four guys who really write that show and run that show and then six or eight hanging out in a room kicking in a few bits.

In television, the writer-creator-showrunner is embraced as the creative mind.

I was running the show on 'United States of Tara' and 'How To Make It In America' where I could say, 'Okay, I'm in charge of everything now.' But it still wasn't my show.

When you decide you want to become a television writer, you naively assume it's going to be like the writers on the old 'Dick Van Dyke Show.' You'll write something and they'll just put it on TV. But what you quickly discover is that American network television is television by committee.

I read every draft of every episode of every series produced at FX.

The idea of being a show runner was very attractive to me, to create and control something.

'Nathan for You' was my first time being in a writer's room, really.

For a writer, working in television is an incredibly rewarding medium. You're in charge of all aspects of production and get to see your vision come to life every week.

Sometimes when you do a whole script, you hand it off, and it gets rewritten by a bunch of people, and people don't really get that much of a sense of how funny you can be.

It's better to write a pilot rather than write a spec show. In some cases, you have to do both, but more often, writing a pilot and having an original voice is more important.

Being a showrunner is tough, but it is incredibly rewarding and it is, without a doubt, the best job I've ever had.

When I write a film, the film gets handed off to a producer and a director and I go my merry way. With television, I am expected and contracted to stick around and actually produce what I've written.

There's nothing more powerful to a showrunner than a truly invested writer.

The producer is at the center of entertainment. The producer is being forgotten, and producers must seize the center of activity.

When you're a writer on a show, your job is to write in the show runner's voice, really.

With network shows, writers can be so protective of every syllable.

TV writing is tricky to navigate because you have so many different personalities - the actors, multiple producers.

But it's true, it's nothing new that decisions about what movies are to be made, and how they're to be made, and who's to be hired to do what, and whether you hire somebody to do their job, or whether you hire somebody to fill a position and you tell them what to do.

When you're lucky enough to get paid a nice chunk of change to write a movie or a TV show, you have no right to complain, really. I guess it's more of an appeal to the powers that be that the less they interfere, the more likely, actually, they are to get something that works, I think.

What's fun now is that I have a show at USA that I co-wrote called 'Benched.' I'm completely behind the scenes and not the actor at all.

I had always wanted to run my own show and focus solely on the writing, and that's what 'Survivor's Remorse' has been for me.

As a producer, I learned not to declare anything about a movie I'm not directing.

I want to direct every now and then, but I don't want to be a director.

There comes a time as you continue to write and work on scripts and screenplays where you realize that you have opinions about the next step of the process, and you kind of want more control over the translation from page to screen.