Steven Knight Quotes

You've got to know the rules to break them.

Sometimes breaking the rules is extending the rules.

What people don't realize is that when you start making things outside of the convention of what is normal or good or 'best practices,' you're also shedding some of the baggage that comes with the concept of what a game 'should' be.

I always say that it's about breaking the rules. But the secret of breaking rules in a way that works is understanding what the rules are in the first place.

I went to grad school because I wanted to learn the rules so I would know how to break them. Breaking the rules is saying, 'I'm breaking in, OK? I'm breaking in your very comfortable little house over here, and I'm going to take a room.'

I feel my role is to push boundaries. I don't like things to be safe and sedentary. So controversy is the cross I have to bear.

Defying genre conventions is instantly a risky move.

I like to play with transgression and upending conventions, and I like the idea of rooting genre films in character.

To hell with the rules. If it sounds right, then it is.

Learn all the rules... then break them.

By all means break the rules.

If I'd observed all the rules, I'd never have got anywhere.

I never imagined myself doing a one-man show. If I'm going to do one, I'd rather do one that breaks all the rules.

I hope to always be doing some low budget things.

If I upset some notions and went against established rules, that wasn't part of what I wanted to do. It wasn't my goal.

When I see a wall that's hung with different objects, framed or unframed, what I like about it is its fluidity and rule-breaking nature. Just experiment a bit.

I am not doing comedy because the genre is successful. If that was the case, I would have done a run-of-the-mill comedy film. I set my own trends. I like to give something new and different to my audiences. I want to do the kind of comedy that has been missing till now.

Being an artist is in part an act of rupture.

I have a certain temperament, a disposition that I think lends itself to not playing outside the lines that much. But I do test the boundaries, certainly, and break one or two of my own. Some people are mystified by it, but not me.

Free yourself from the rigid conduct of tradition and open yourself to the new forms of probability.

To be able to create fully, it's maybe fine that you learn the rules, but you have to forget and to rebel against those rules.

When I started making movies, I was pretty young, and at the time I felt like there needed to be more confrontation in cinema - or I needed to make something more disruptive - so in the beginning, those movies were me wanting to play with the rules.

The rules are learnt in order to be broken, but if you don't know them, then something is missing.

Original thought, original artistic expression is by its very nature questioning, irreverent, iconoclastic.

Being vital means knowing the rules and being brave enough to break them.