Quotes from Steven Knight

Books are in the holy shape. They are silent and yet they speak directly into the imagination. You can burn them but they are more powerful than fire. All the knowledge of the ancient ones are put into them. The secrets of the age of vision. - Paris, See: Season 1 Ep.2

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.

Sometimes if you're a director, you want to believe that you're great and capable at all aspects - the technical side, the lights, everything - but I'm not.

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.

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

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.

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

There was an unbelievable amount of animosity in that war [for America Independence] which people have forgotten, which was still around 50 years later.

What I wanted to do [in Allied] was get two characters who fall in love for real, across the barricade, and then it transcends the war.

From the age of about 8 to the age of about 15, I was obsessed with Native Americans.

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

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

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

I am definitely going to continue directing, but I am always going to try to explore new ways of making films. It really is possible to make films in different ways.

There are so many rules about how you make a film and so many conventions that you can and can't do. I think people have forgotten that they are just rules that were invented for convenience - sometimes it is more convenient not to obey the rules.

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.

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.

I do lots of projects in film and TV. You have some that are lucky, and some that are unlucky.

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

I think there's a tendency in England, when you look at the past, to either have upper middle class period drama with its own rules, or if you're going to look at working class people, you have to do that in a particular 'Isn't it a shame, aren't they oppressed' way, or it's treated comically.

I think that helps because there has been no formality of friendship, the politeness of friendship, so we can just work directly on the work that's ahead of us [with Tom Hardey].

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

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.

Getting 'Millionaire' right was as hard as writing 'Dirty Pretty Things.' Harder. In the pilots, contestants kept wanting to take the money; we had to find ways - the lifelines - of keeping them in the seat, answering the questions. But there is so much snobbery about popular culture. A game show just isn't valued as much as a novel.