102 Quotes by Steven Knight

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

Now because the film industry is what it is, if people are expecting a certain film genre and they're not getting it, there are howls of outrage.

I will never unravel the mystery of how a script gets into the hands of certain people.

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

Writing, when it works, one needs to access whatever it is that creates dreams.

I want to be influenced by the world not TV or film.

Any question about narrative storytelling is answered by Dickens.

Any genre as it's called, I think can be quite reductive in terms of what a film is, because I think there is an eagerness to put in any film, in anybody's work, to give it a genre title and I think as a consequence of that, the film starts to obey the rules of the genre.

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.