Top 178 Quotes & Sayings by Steven Knight

No, I don't actually look at Twitter.

There's no writers room, or any other writer involved. I write everything from beginning to end. Maybe it's just me not being able to let go of something, especially with 'Peaky.'

Peaky' has attracted a lot of attention from different disciplines in the arts. It was originally going to be a ballet, which is Ballet Rambert, and there is also a lot of music artists who offer their music to the show to be used on the soundtrack.

I just don't like cinemas very much. And when I do see a film it depresses me.

There's a convention in English stuff that if something is more than 100 years old, people have to say 'do not' instead of 'don't. They have to say 'will not' instead of 'won't.' People are speaking in a way that is not accessible or normal. And people didn't ever speak like that.

There has been a tendency only to deal with a certain social class when it comes to stories more than 100 years ago.

I think an under-recognized fact is that TV has changed because the screens have, we now have these massive screen in our homes... so it's worth making your show look good.

So many American and international producers want to shoot in the U.K. because of our crew base and tax incentives.

I often find in the film world, that it's very self-referring. If you talk to someone about films, they talk about them in terms of other films - rather than as something that happened to them in their life. And I'm really keen to get back to film as a reference to real things, not necessarily to other films.

It's good sometimes to have a character that starts as one thing and ends as another, but James Bond, Hercules, these are pretty enduring stories.

There's always a concern over budget with film too but people are more extravagant when they're making a feature. In television everything's tight, everything's paired down and it's just a question of making it look expensive.

I think the East India Company represents what we would think of as a very modern approach to the world where everything was counted, every penny was counted.

There's nothing wrong with the classic ways of adapting stuff.

Some accents people - internationally - can't understand, also they come with baggage. London means a certain thing, Liverpool means a certain thing. Whereas with Welsh, he can be a middle-class man with working-class roots and still have an accent and it not be an issue.

The whole process of filmmaking can be chaotic, but if you can have an enthusiastic cast, you're pretty much there.

I think the best actors do both. I think they fulfill what you want them to do, in terms of the vision for the whole piece. And then they always bring something that does surprise you and shock you.

Taboo' certainly isn't a commentary on other types of period drama. It's just a different way of tackling one.

The film business seems to attract rules more than any other business. I don't know why it does. I think it's because there's so much money at stake.

My mum was a bookies' runner at nine years old and my dad's uncles were Peaky Blinders and gangsters.

My dad's uncles were illegal bookmakers who were known in the area as Peaky Blinders, that's the stories I heard.

I've had more reaction to 'Peaky' than anything. People react really intensely.

If I choose to direct something, it's because I don't think it would get accepted.

I think there is something about a good person doing bad things for what they consider to be a good reason. Then the battle is on to almost prove to the audience that it's justified. How far can you go with that? How far can that character go before people won't accept it? Trying to walk to edge of that line is a challenge.

Spaghetti Junction is the most beautiful thing you've ever seen at night.

Expect the unexpected, is what I'd say about 'Taboo.'

I'm a big Birmingham City supporter and seeing the fans dressed as Peaky Blinders is one of my proudest moments.

There's such a wealth of literature from the 18th century and 19th century, George Eliot... Jane Austen... that's all about a genteel high society, relationships, all of that stuff. There wasn't ever really, apart from Dickens, a literary evocation of working class life.

I'm not a big fan of prequels to be honest.

With TV, your structure is determined by the series not the episode. You can have incident without consequence to the character, but keep your eye on the ticking clock of the series.

I never map things out in advance. It would be better if I did and more economical in terms of time, but I've found that if you work out a plot line from beginning to end, at the beginning it becomes very rational.

Any question about narrative storytelling is answered by Dickens.

You can make somebody bad for a long time, and people love it when they then do one good thing and it's almost like a triumph. Actors seem to enjoy it more.

I think it's always good not to listen to what the rules are supposed to be about the arc of the character and the third acts and all this stuff.

With any period piece I think the thing to do is forget that it's not contemporary when you're writing and to have the characters feel as much as possible like characters that you would know.

I was doing two things at once for quite a long time. I was working in television and writing novels.

There's a grown-upness about television now that wasn't there before. You do know you're doing stuff for adults who can tell the difference between right and wrong, well hopefully, and make judgements about violence. And with 'Peaky,' always if there is an act of violence, there is a consequence.

Whenever I went to L.A. the first thing people said in the meeting, no matter what it was about, was how much they loved 'Peakys.' So Hollywood was really going for it which is always a good start. Also Snoop Dogg is a big fan.

In the States a lot of Hispanic and black audiences are gravitating towards 'Peaky Blinders.' A mate of went into a bar in Santa Monica and sent me a photo of four blokes dressed as Peakies - they meet every week for a 'Peaky Blinders' evening.

True stories are always good because they're so odd, and so unlikely. It's always good to have a world that people don't know about - a world that hasn't yet been done. It's like treading on fresh snow. You're the first one there. It always feels good to be dealing with a period of history or a world that no one else has dealt with.

In history there's what's written down and there's what actually happened.

No money has ever been spent on 'Peaky Blinders' in terms of publicity, there's no massive campaign - because it's the BBC you just get the trailers. But what's happened is people have found it for themselves and I think the loyalty is greater when people find than when they're told to watch something.

When you think 'Peaky Blinders,' when it first began it got mixed reviews and people didn't know what to do with it, and it was like: 'Why is there modern music on this?' So I think whenever you do something different you're going to get that response.

TV is a writer's medium, the writer is in charge effectively. So what you write is what gets shot, so in that sense I prefer it. But in terms of the scale of it, features are fantastic.

Manchester's history is cotton and wool. Birmingham's is iron and steel.

In Britain, when the working class are summoned for fiction, it's 'isn't it a shame, isn't it a pity, isn't it awful, the terribly poor things... ' whereas from within, it's nothing like that. It's fantastic, it's glamorous, it's terrible and good the same as it is for everybody.

I love the BBC. I love working with the BBC. They leave you alone; they give you zero notes. It's like being on vacation.

I think certain periods of history don't get dealt with because I think historians, and it's their job, but they look back and look for patterns. They look for sequences and they look for reasons, and certain periods of history don't fit with the general pattern of 1500 to the 20th century, during which there's the creation of the United States.

Locke' was sort of myself trying to find out if you could give yourself the maximum number of obstacles to make enough drama and seeing if you could do it.

I'm not a great film-goer, and I never have been.

Well directing TV is very time-consuming, so if you are going to direct TV, a season will take a year out of your life.

A funny thing about film is that it's the only medium where people say there are really rules that you have to stick to. Nobody says to the writer - in a film you've got to have three acts - there's a character arc you have to do - there's no reason that's true.

There are always people who are doing things that don't fit the official accounts.

I find in Britain people are both more arty and more willing to rip you off.

I think it's a bit like saying a painter does a painting everyone loves and it's 40% blue paint, so from now on you have to paint paintings that are 40% blue. That's the film industry at its most blunt, which is why it's constantly bats and spiders and superheroes.

Any attempt to recreate a world of 1814, or 100 years before that - I think it's important to understand that the people of the time had a different concept of what reality was. Their reality was much more haunted.

In terms of the symbolism, I think that if you do it right, writing is a bit like dreaming.

There used to be grandparents who would say that if you were misbehaving the Peaky Blinders would get you, they were the bogeymen.

Horses do sense things way before people.

Peaky' is a very personal thing for me because it's based on stories that I was told as a kid by my parents. At the very beginning, I tried to have other writers involved but it just didn't work.

I think it is best that if you are the writer you just leave the director to it. With the caveat that you state, 'Be gentle with the script. And if there are changes, consult me.'