Steven Knight Quotes

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.

Several people, not just reviewers, took me to task for writing about what they called the working classes - something I've been doing for 40 years. I thought that was contemptible - what do they want to do, ghettoize the working class as a subject? Can you only write about your own class? I've written about royalty, am I not allowed to do that?

The ignorance of the working class and the superior intelligence of the privileged class are superstitions fostered by ... universities and churches, and by all the centers of privilege.

I'm not a fan of the working class being mocked, including by some of our famous writers - even those who came from it.

Because of England's lack of social mobility, unless they make truly heroic efforts, writers who are privately educated and then go on to Oxbridge or an institution like the BBC will generally embarrass themselves when they attempt to have a go at working- or lower middle-class characters.

The biggest crime in England is to rise above your station. It's fine to be a pop star. 'Oh, it's great, lots of fun, aren't they sweet, these pop stars! But to think you have anything to say about how the world should work? What arrogance!'

Everything is about class in England, whether it's upper, lower or middle. Why should that be?

We don't have a lot of class-conscious filmmaking.

And, for an instant, she stared directly into those soft blue eyes and knew, with an instinctive mammalian certainty, that the exceedingly rich were no longer even remotely human.

In England we only make films about the working class or the aristocracy.

I never knew the lower classes had such white skins.

If you're white working class, it's very easy to caricature the elites, and if you're elite, it's very easy to caricature the white working class.

Not that I am hugely working class, but in the U.K. I'm always perceived, casting-wise, as being working class.

The whole idea of 'Death Line' was to kind of highlight class distinctions in England more than to make a scary movie, and I just kind of wrapped my political treatise of the class distinctions in England in this movie.

So often in English fiction, people are either upper-class twits, or else they're knockabouts, less than human.

Since I still think of myself as a middle class guy, people get to see that side of me in films like 'Middle Class Abbayi.'

I reckoned my accent and class would count against me; I didn't see actresses as being working-class.

The thing that really struck me when I went to junior high was class. I grew up on a pretty poor street, but the school district I was in included some fine neighborhoods - so I got to know a couple of the kids from those places and went to their houses and experienced such culture shock.

Being a posh actor in England you cannot escape the class-typing from whatever side you look at it.

I'm seen as a chronicler of the class system, which I don't think is unfair.

There are three social classes in America: upper middle class, middle class, and lower middle class.

My father kept his distance from working-class American blacks.

I've never felt entirely comfortable in high society. I'm more comfortable talking to the bar staff than the super-rich. I don't really get what makes them tick.

I'm working class, and want people to know I'm not unintelligent and all the other cliches that come with it.

The white working class likes being pandered to even less than it likes being insulted.