Jesse Armstrong

“Wars are hard to look at head-on.”

“The best bit about having a collaborator is plot. Plot is quite hard to get right. It is a testing intellectual exercise that feels quite different to being in the flow of voice or characterisation. I like having someone to construct a plot with.”

“Writers tend to feel like outsiders.”

“We always knew that we could write what it's like to be men together, bickering, but also having this fondness.”

“It's touching that people only think there's one of these around. Dynastic families are all around us.”

“I like people to make their own decisions.”

“The human propensity to having opinions must, I guess, have started as a pretty useful evolutionary tool.”

“Succession moments are always dangerous for democracies.”

“I love the breadth and space you get to explore character in so-called serialized TV, the novelistic element of maybe being able to find out who people are. But I also very much like the sitcom discipline of having a self-contained episode that you could conceivably, I hope, be able to enjoy in and of itself.”

“Some of the material in 'Peep Show' I wouldn't sit down and watch with even my parents, who are not easily offended.”

“Oswestry's a bit in the middle of nowhere - quite tough, and quite English, in the way border towns are.”

“When you talk to police communications staff and think about their job from an insider's point of view, you can see they have to inch out along a razor's edge every day. They have a duty to be honest. But there's also a responsibility not to inflame.”

“For people who come from powerful families, there is nothing in life quite as interesting as being at court.”

“You can't control how things that you're involved with are received. But 'The Thick of It' wasn't intended as an instruction manual. Writers like hearing how bits of this stuff have got out into the world - but it was not meant to be a joyful celebration of the way these people behave.”

“Who has not stared at the blank page and not been able to think of anything to write for what at least felt like six months? Getting started is the hardest bit, obviously.”

“There's a reason we have a lot of pomp and ceremony around coronations and the transfer of power in democracies. It's a scary moment. The rules aren't clear.”

“In 2005, the Iraq war was entering its third year and no one believed that we were going to find WMDs any more. The prewar claims of their certain existence were becoming an embarrassing joke, a big present we'd been offered that was getting ever later in showing up.”

“I wouldn't like to say I'm a class warrior.”

“Standups always like the room cold, and if you're shooting a sitcom live you want it a little bit chilly for the audience. I don't know why - you'd have to ask a combination of an evolutionary psychologist and a building-maintenance man.”

“Why do I bother having all my stupid opinions? I mean, really, my ever evolving Balkan policy of the mid-1990s - what did I think was going to happen? That I was going to be supersubbed out of Oddbins and into the Foreign Office?”