Steven Knight Quotes

I was always told at school I was posh, then I came to London, and here I'm told I have a country accent.

I think people tend to underestimate you when you have a Northern accent, for instance if you have to talk to the CEO of an international company. But then when I'm talking to someone in a factory, it's just like being with my mum's mates.

When I first left drama school, I was too posh for the working-class parts and not posh enough for the upper-class roles. You know what England is like: the gradations of accent and how you're judged by them are still there. I discovered that to get a break you have to lie about where you're from.

Just because I don't speak English with an accent anymore doesn't mean that I'm better than the people who do.

I remember early in my career people telling me I needed to change my accent, that I needed to sound more professional, more BBC perhaps, but I think if I wasn't from Middlesbrough I wouldn't have done as well as I have.

I learned to change my accent; in England, your accent identifies you very strongly with a class, and I did not want to be held back.

Trouble is, some accents lend themselves to comedy.

I think every English actor is nervous of a Newcastle accent.

The accent in England can change literally from street to street, and people have this sort of feudal tribalism whereby you can identify somebody's provenance by their voice.

When I first started out, being from the South and going to New York or Chicago, people kept telling me to get voice lessons and 'lose that stupid accent you got.' And I'm like, 'Well, where I come from, you have the stupid accent.'

The thing about being black and having a different accent, in the beginning, is that it makes you foreign.

My mum made a conscious decision not to teach me any Indian languages so I wouldn't talk with an accent.

I know there are lots of regional accents in England, but I can't tell them apart and I'm not really aware of class. I don't pay any attention to those boundaries. I'm a California girl.

At various points, I've had a massive chip on me shoulder. I had fights about me accent with loads of those fellers you get from third-class public schools. They used to think I was speaking German.

I'm from the South, where if you walk down the street and there's somebody behind you talking with a Southern accent, you can't tell whether it's a black or a white person.

I grew up three and a half hours outside of Chicago, but people would call me a 'hick' or 'country boy.' Maybe it's because I talked with more of a country accent.

I don't really pay attention to which accent I have. I'm in a singular box as an actress.

I've been going through immigration all my life, and I've been stopped for traffic violations by cops, and they get much more curious about me than the regular guy. The moment they hear my accent, things get a little deeper.

I've always been 'other' in all the spaces that I've been in. Even when I first moved to America, just the idea that I was a dark-skinned black girl from England with an accent. It's one thing to be a black girl, but it's another to be a dark black girl. I was chastised for that. I was chastised for the way I spoke.

I've been banging on about doing stuff in Birmingham for years and years, and everyone says 'We can't, it's the accent thing.' For some reason it's a very difficult accent to get right, harder even than Geordie.

It's funny because when you're a Welshman living in England, you always get the mickey taken out of you for being Welsh, and then when you go to Wales with an English accent because you were born in Bristol and grew up in Birmingham, they say you're English. You can never win.

I know Asian actors out there won't even audition for a role that have an accent. But for me, I was the kid with an accent. I still have an accent to some degree.

My parents speak with an accent. A lot of people that I know speak with an accent. I have friends who speak with an accent. Accents in a vacuum aren't a problem; it's how you portray those characters and how well they're served in a script.

When I went to London, they told me I spoke with a funny accent - English with a Chinese accent.

If you want to underestimate me because I speak like a Mancunian, like the people I grew up with, then so be it at your peril.