Steven Moffat

If you take most men aside when their wives are pregnant, most men are pretty frightened and worried and faintly disgusted by the whole experience.

My problem is that the audience is more fiction-literate than ever. In Shakespeare's day, you probably expected to see a play once or twice in your life; today you experience four or five different kinds of fiction every day. So staying ahead of the audience is impossible.

When you're surrounded by friends and exes, there's a whole lot of stuff that starts crawling out. But however serious and traumatic those experiences may be to the participant, to the onlooker they're hilarious.

You'll go out of business if you think people are stupid.

The trouble with a series as it gets older is it can feel like a tradition, and tradition is the enemy of suspense, and it's the enemy of comedy. It's the enemy of everything, really. So you have to shake it up.

I think of myself as a writer with a sense of humour rather than a comedy writer. Happy to tell a story with lots of jokes in it - I wouldn't know how to do jokes without the story.

I think training in comedy, as it were, a history writing comedy, is a powerful tool for anyone.

I know this is going to sound very self-serving, and I apologize for it, but if you can write comedy, you can pretty much write anything, because it's the hardest. It's the most technically demanding, the most precisely evaluated form of writing. People know if it works or not. There's a big button marked 'fail,' and that's when nobody laughs.

Well, I'm permitted to say anything I like. I just don't.

I hope I won't become hated by geeks everywhere, but I don't really know comic books all that well.

To me, a 'brand' sounds evil.

If you don't expect to like someone and then you do, that's an incredibly exciting moment.