Phoebe Waller-Bridge

As women, we get the message about how to be a good girl - how to be a good, pretty girl - from such an early age. Then, at the same time, we're told that well-behaved girls won't change the world or ever make a splash.

You don't often see a cross section of female characters interacting with each other at the top of a chain.

I think, a lot of time, I'm just writing my worst fears, of the idea of losing my mom or my best friend or doing something so terrible to somebody that's kind of deemed unforgivable or having a really broken family.

You're allowed to bore your friends and family, but to bore your audience is unforgivable.

If you hear somebody say something absolutely horrendous about their own life, in quite a flippant, offbeat kind of way, when you meet people clearly trying to be strong and brave, the ones who are really good at it are the ones who break my heart the most.

When an audience is laughing with a character, they make themselves so vulnerable, and they open up. They expose their heart the moment they're laughing, because they're relaxed and they're disarmed.

I feel liberated being around women who are liberated.

People are always trying to be on top. And not always with a macabre agenda, but I think that people are desperately trying to remain in control, rather than being honest.

I always knew that if I was ever going to perform something that I wrote in front of an audience, I was going to do the thing I most like to experience as an audience member, which is to be tricked.

I'll never get bored of seeing flawed women on the screen.

Whenever I get stuck on something, I'm like, 'What would I do if I wasn't afraid? What would I write if I wasn't afraid? What would I say in this situation if I wasn't afraid?'

I wanted to give people that feeling of wanting to hug the TV and just admit that you're unhappy.

The main relationship in the whole series was the one between the camera and Fleabag. I had to convince myself that whoever was watching on the other side of the camera was instantly complicit with Fleabag and instantly a friend of hers.

However much people want to politicize every movement of a controversial woman in life or on the screen, we just have to keep being personal and truthful, or we will explode.

I don't think the challenge is asking an audience to like a character; it's inviting them to try and understand them... then making that journey entertaining and worth their while. It's a classic trick, but it's human, and it allows characters to have more depth.