Steven Knight Quotes

Script comes first, then the actors, then you gotta be lucky enough to get the right time slot. Then people have to watch.

You do a show to be a hit and hopefully run a couple of years.

'The Simpsons' obviously is a huge success, and Fox has nothing to do with its success, with its creative success, and as a result they don't really like the show. They don't like 'The Simpsons' at Fox.

A lot of factors go into the longevity of a show.

I didn't expect people would embrace 'Ang Probinsyano' the way they did during its first year.

The show became popular as aspecialthing became popular. And Sasquatch, the guy who runs that site, started coming to every show and reviewing it. And when people start talking about the reviews from the stage. That to me is really self indulgent and we tried to put a caper on that.

There's more to come. Series 4 [of Peaky Blinders] is coming soon. But I'm proud of making my hometown, which is considered to be completely unfashionable, slightly fashionable. People actually know where it is now.

'Khoobsurat' was an eye-opener in many ways. Cinema is a colossal money-churning business in India, and working in that environment offered me quite an incredible learning experience.

In the entertainment industry all that anybody wants to do whether it's music or stories or dancing or comedy or whatever, they want to entertain the public. And they do it any way they can. Sometimes they concentrate simply on entertaining people and they don't care what message they are giving.

At network television you could make a show like Freaks and Geeks, and even though 7 million people watch is every week, you were considered a terrible failure, and they got rid of you and staff. Now ... It's like a world where the replacements are the biggest fans in the world. It's, the Elvis Costellos of television are the winners. Creativity is king and it's very very exciting.

You can only make art that talks to the masses when you have nothing to say to them.

I’ve been on a lot of shows that nobody cared about. This one’s fun because a lot more people are interested in the show, wanting to talk about the mystery and that kind of stuff.

There are so many wonderful shows that come out through the year. What makes some stick is an unknown factor, you know? It's gotta be the right show at the right time. Really, you've got to have magic elements line up. But I felt that this was going to be something that was really going to ring true to people.

Don't expect the theatre to satisfy the habits of its audience, but to change them.

Success begets more in television.

If you're someone who's making film or TV or music, or any kind of art form now, there's a billion outlets and they all have an opinion.

My real pleasure is that 4 times a week 1,800 people are standing up and shouting on Broadway for an author who died hundreds of years ago.

I want to make movies that people see. I really think that movies are the most popular form of story telling ever and have such a huge impact on culture when they do.

One of the challenges of the show has always been trying to be surprising, and that was easy to do when nobody was watching it. Now that people have started watching it, they get ahead of us. We've all started really guarding the material, just to make it fun for the audience.

So to make movies, if you're first goal is to make money, well you can! Make a tent-pole movie that China wants. But that's not the kind of thing that's really going to get your remembered. You're not going to change anything with that. You might become rich from it!

I want to be a part of something, and when we define movies now based on how they do on the weekend. We live in a society of "thumbs up, thumbs down."

You never know how things work and what exactly is going to grab an audience. Sometimes even the best material and the best collection of people interpreting that material just for some reason doesn't fly with people. There are a lot of TV shows or movies that maybe aren't as good as others that do work when it comes to finding an audience. It's a mystery, that whole thing. If somebody figured it out, this would be quite a great industry.

First of all, very few people listen to Hugh Hewitt, radio show, that's the good news. Check out the ratings.

There is nothing interesting about just seeing me doing the show then seeing the fans and how much people love me.

I would never go back to doing the show again. I mean, every day I think about Lifestyles because somebody comes up to me and tells me how much they love the show and I should bring it back, but this is not the time to bring it back. I don't think it would be as successful today as it once was.