Michaela Coel

“If there's anyone out there that looks a bit like me, or just feels a little bit out of place just trying to get into performing, you are beautiful; embrace it. You are intelligent; embrace it. You are powerful; embrace it.”

“'Chewing Gum' is the London that I know.”

“I wrote a play at drama school, which was a dark comedy - people laughed and cried. And then my script of one of the shows was picked up by a comedy sketch company... so then I had to write comedy.”

“I don't know what it would have been like to grow up with a man in the house.”

“'Chewing Gum' is kind of like the world I wish I grew up in. There wasn't really a sense of community growing up.”

“When you've got African parents, you go to uni, do finance, and go into accounting. But I'm not good with systems. I dropped out in my final year of college to become a Christian poet. Then went back to do my A-levels and went to uni in Birmingham to do political science and theology. I lasted 12 weeks.”

“What was nice for me was that when I got to secondary school - like high school - I met many other Ghanaian schoolgirls whose parents were also born in Ghana and were raising them here. We automatically had a huge kinship that was amazing.”

“My generation of black British people often feels part American because of what we learned from TV.”

“Now I'm steeped in this world, I keep thinking going to the theatre every week is normal, but there's a whole world of people who don't go at all. I wrote 'Chewing Gum Dreams' for them - I'd love them to come.”

“I feel angry with myself the way I handled the Bible and Christianity. A lot more people are more normal with Christianity. I was crazy... telling people you will go to hell. I lost all my friends because of my militant faith.”

“In comedy, I often see so many weird race jokes, and it's like, there is no racial diversity in your show to even make those race jokes. The problem is that there is no one in the back to say, 'Hey, that race joke is not really appropriate.'”

“Drama school taught me not to be precious.”

“So many of my memories revolve around TV.”

“We live in this era where we really enjoy being offended, although only on the Internet. I don't know how beneficial it is. I wonder if we live in an age where we don't have power, yet somehow feel we have virtual power. But I feel like it's a distraction from real life.”

“I have to go to sleep with music.”

“When I think of the things that I want to write, I can never say them out loud because I know how crazy they sound. I know what things sound like when you haven't actually worked on the script, so I don't go around saying some of these ideas because they just sound awful.”

“Women are tired of 'presenting' themselves; we just want to be who we are.”

“The idea of wanting to do something that's completely natural and then having to repress it is something that I find fascinating.”

“'Chewing Gum' is a sitcom set on an estate in east London. Its central character is a girl from a Pentecostal background who decides to embark on a more worldly lifestyle - it's about adolescence 10 years too late. In my dreams, everybody is watching it, finding out about my world and realising it's not what they imagined. That it's not terrifying.”

“In Britain, we need to start presenting the option of being a writer in front of black women. We need to present the idea of being a writer into poorer communities because the majority of black people in this country are working class. We need to let working-class people know that their voices are important.”