Steven Moffat

“When writing comedy, you have to have the confidence to believe that there is only one type of relationship in the world, and we are all having it, that all men behave in the same way and so do all women.”

“Because every time you see them happy you remember how sad they're going to be. And it breaks your heart. Because what's the point in them being happy now if they're going to be sad later. The answer is, of course, because they a re going to be sad later.”

“I can't see what's wrong about assuming intelligence in your audience and what's bad news about being rewarded for assuming that.”

“Writing for adults often means just increasing the swearing - but find an alternative to swearing and you've probably got a better line.”

“To me, a 'brand' sounds evil.”

“Cinema is so slow and boring compared to television.”

“Maybe I'm in Hell. That's okay, I'm not scared of Hell - it's just Heaven for bad people.”

“You have to take your own bold approach, and if you do you will be rewarded with success. Or calamitous failure. That can happen too.”

“This was supposed to be yesterday. I was sitting on the Cardiff/London train, supposedly about to write this very column, and realising something quite terrible. My head was entirely empty. A vast echoing void. Bigger on the inside, but with nothing in it. You could drop a pebble in my brain and wait for an hour to hear it land. No actually, you couldn't - that would be aggressive and unhelpful, so keep your damn pebbles to yourself.”

“Fascinatingly confident, rude people are great.”

“People don't really have a relationship with great writing or great production or great art direction or great direction. They just sort of admire it.”

“My priorities are where they should be, which is making really great, really exciting television.”

“The universe is big. It's vast and complicated and ridiculous. And sometimes—very rarely—impossible things just happen and we call them miracles.”

“I don't want to think that the stories are finite; I want to feel that they can go on forever.”

“Well we've moved through the funfair a bit - we've done the rollercoaster, now we're on the ghost train.”

“I absolutely love television, and I don't mean to be vulgar, but as I keep having to explain to people from the movie industry, I get more power and more money doing television, so why on earth would I do a film?”