Quotes from Steven Knight

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

The things that are considered to be respectable have their roots in unrespectable things.

I remember going to Birmingham City matches as a kid and there were these other kids in Small Heath who had their own odd, partly Scouse accent.

Once upon a time there was a physicality to the business of investigating a serious crime. There were objects, pieces of paper, even good old-fashioned fingerprints. Today it's different. Because all of us are routinely and voluntarily giving the intimate details of our lives to all kinds of people whether we realize it or not.

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.

I'm a massive Bowie fan, always have been.

Part of the reason for doing 'Peaky Blinders,' apart from the fact that it was a personal story and I've always wanted to do it, was what was great I felt is that Birmingham is probably the least fashionable city in Britain.

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.

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.

Making a film is hard because you're not dealing with the intangible. When you're writing, it's perfect because it's only in your head and then you have to take it into the physical world and that's where things drop off and things fall apart and you have to fix them.

I want to make people see that evil is seductive and that we need to be careful.

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.

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

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.

I read more and more and I came across this character, Caroline Weldon. Sometimes in history, you find these people that no one would dare create. They're too mad.

There's lots of different ways of writing stuff and lots of different mindsets to have, but I think when it's your own creation, it's more pleasurable because you have total control.

Closed Circuit' came out of a general anxiety about surveillance. Government surveillance and private surveillance.

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.

What I like about 'Taboo' just in general, even in writing it, you are not certain what the motives are sometimes because these characters are so odd that you let them speak for themselves and you're never quite sure where it's headed.

Sometimes you take something because it's an offer and it's big and it's good money and you have to absolutely respect that process, because it's not easier.

Dialogue is what I like doing. It's what I am good at doing.

What Westerns did was to take a world and mythologise it.

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 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.