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.

Michaela Coel

We need to encourage black women to know that they are authors of their own destiny, that they have important stories to tell, and that they are capable, so magically capable, of writing them and creating important pieces of work that will live forever in history.

Michaela Coel

In drama school, they do these big shows and period dramas, and I felt that none of those shows were representing me as a person, and I knew I wouldn't be cast in any of those when I left school. I decided to write my own one-woman show, and that was called 'Chewing Gum Dreams.'

Michaela Coel

The first time I got into astrology was being in New York. I was like, 'Oh, this is a real thing here!' Now, I'll Google what your sign is and what my sign is to see the predictions of friendship, and I find that really cool. But that's the most I know.

Michaela Coel

I think you just have to do you, whatever that is, and not feel like you have to be a certain way for other people to like you.

Michaela Coel

Don't sit there and complain. Rub your hands together and figure out what to do.

Michaela Coel

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.

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.

Michaela Coel

Where I grew up, in Aldgate, east London, one of the poorest boroughs in the country, I saw lots that was real - the bankers with their briefcases, the man next door with five wives, the illegal immigrants in Flat 5. I'm from a world you rarely see on screen, and I want to show it off.

Michaela Coel

We can put fear of the future in front of us to block us, or behind us to drive us forward. I feel like telling all the people who look like me to start trying to write. You don't know it's possible because it's not often in front of you.

Michaela Coel

To see people laughing or crying or listening, then being inspired to do their own thing? I can't think of anything better than that.

Michaela Coel

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

Michaela Coel

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

Michaela Coel

Comedy in the past hasn't spoken to women because it wasn't written by women, and male writers don't make women three-dimensional characters. Too often, women just facilitate the man's comedy: they're not crazy; they're not funny. But women are as vulgar as they are elegant, as stinky as they are smelling of eau de parfum.

Michaela Coel

To suggest things may be going on in our brains that we aren't fully conscious of, that we unknowingly make classist, sexist and racist presumptions... Well, there just aren't many comfortable ways to take that. And in the face of discomfort comes the mask of defence.

Michaela Coel

We live in a world where if you're white, an upper-class male of extreme privilege, and able-bodied, and you're nothing that takes you away from that norm, then you're going to have - then the world will not assign you problems because of what you are. That is actually the world we live in.

Michaela Coel

'Chewing Gum' is the London that I know.

Michaela Coel

'Chewing Gum Dreams' should make you look twice at the girl shouting on the bus and not just cuss her off from your life.

Michaela Coel

I love Jeremy Corbyn, definitely.

Michaela Coel

Men are trained to like this version of womanhood, and when someone comes along smashing the table and messing up the party, it's a bit like, 'Get out; why are you disturbing the peace?'

Michaela Coel

'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.

Michaela Coel