Steven Knight Quotes

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

Joanna points her camera at a section of society unused to having cameras pointed at it. But I don't know about categorizing them in terms of class; I'm a bit wary of that. My dad is the son of a shipbuilder.

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.

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

I come from an Irish working-class background but went to a posh school, and any type of pretension was quickly mocked at home. I've always had a keen eye for pretension.

Telly never has any smart, amusing intellectuals living on a council estate.

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.

You never find an Englishman among the under-dogs except in England, of course.

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

It should go without saying that there are as many working-class people who hold socially liberal views as there are public-school bigots.

My family wasn't involved in the college. They were more of just your 'white trash' kind of family. And so I have that kind of background, but I always kind of aspired to be something else, and I made a lot of different friends over the years that were passing through.

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

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

Working-class people don't tend to be wooed by celebrity.

One of the nicest things about receiving the accolade of Australia is that, previously, the knighthood was historically for what was termed 'the establishment.' Now, this is an accolade for somebody who comes from a working-class background. Someone whose father was a truck driver and decided to buy a truck.

I didn't necessarily grow up in a trailer park, but there is a brief part of that in my life. So I can make fun of it a little bit. I'm not too much of an outsider, where I'm just making fun of someone.

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

And understand: class differences will not save you.

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

I think the class divide is going to change. I think a lot more working class people are going to get published. It is really class ridden, literature.

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

The working class of England take their deracination completely for granted. Disenchantment is the happy code that informs every byway of the underclass: service jobs, celebrity dreams, Lotto wins, leisured poverty on pre-crunch credit cards, it's all there, part of the story of an English people whose grandparents never had it so good.

I've never written nearly as much about place as people seem to think I do. I just write about class.

I've never been aware of the difference between so-called posh actors and working-class actors.