Playwright

I used to believe in God as a child. God, for me, was linked with hope.

I definitely people-watch. I often see photos of myself with my children: I'm always in the background with my mouth wide open, looking somewhere else.

I write an actual script rather quickly - a draft will take me two weeks - but I write a lot of drafts. My big thing is I don't re-read. When I write, I never re-read back. I'll send it, because if I re-read back, it will cripple me.

If the world is in complete flux for me and life is falling apart, if I just manage to get myself in front of a computer or at my desk, it calms.

To be honest, if I was going to have any kind of fantasy, be it left-wing or otherwise, it wouldn't involve Margaret Thatcher.

All work is a process of failure. Every single thing I write, I look at it and go, 'Do better. That's not good enough. Do better.' And so, that keeps me up at night.

I am the most tense, annoying person in the world.

I don't look back. I don't look forward. I am totally now.

The older I get, the more I have to think long and hard about what I need to say and why.

There are so many actresses I want to write for. I see them, and I think, 'Why is she not playing that lead? What's happened to that actress?' I think all I can do is to write parts for women, to say, 'Keep going, keep acting, because there are parts for you. There will be those plays.'

I need to be in charge, and that comes from when I was growing up and money was always an issue. I didn't want to feel the fear of poverty again, and I suppose, in that way, I qualify as Thatcher Youth.

Eddie Marsan is just my favourite actor of all time. I love everything he's been in, so it's a dream come true to work with him.

I think I'm always running away from somewhere, and to me, theatre's always felt like a good place to run away to.

Even if you've been a coward all your life, death is a heroic act.

When you see in this country and every other part of the world the huge pay disparity - in Hollywood, in every profession in the U.K., globally - and you see what is happening to women in every country socially and culturally, you can't not be a feminist.

Yes, I've heard of the 'Mad Men' comparisons, but I like to think 'The Hour' has its own distinctive voice. Although it is set in 1956, I have tried to give it a contemporary edge, and its themes of love, passion, romance, fury, professional jealousy, and personal failure are universal, I think.

I love the South Bank: every era of architecture is there, and you can stop, look, and listen.

London does two things for me: it makes me feel connected, and it also makes me feel very isolated and quite lonely at times, and that's someone with two children in their family.

The older I get, the more I have to think long and hard about what I need to say and why.

I work from about 8:30 A.M. until 7 P.M., five days a week, when I'm not sneaking off to buy another bar of chocolate.