Steven Knight Quotes

I'm not big on sequels; I've done them, but I like doing little things that have their own timelessness to them, classic type things, and then you go onto something new.

I don't take anything from the podcast and bring it to my act, because I feel like that's been burned, unless I feel like I can really develop it beyond two or three jumps beyond what I said on the podcast.

I learned to do things the way the old-timers did.

The good books stick around for a reason. There is a reason that we come back to them and they are so rewarding.

I feel like, as an industry, we've gotten too dependent on source material originated in other mediums.

It's going back to old school, the way it was done and I'm finding out there is something different, a little interesting. There is something just a little fresh about it because I haven't seen it done like that in a little while. I'm embracing it, you know.

I've always called myself a writer/performer, not an actor because I basically write what I perform.

I also like different records of mine for creative purposes and metaphorically wise.

Old ideas can sometimes use new buildings. New ideas must use old buildings.

If you can't write your own material, you have very little chance of making it as a comedian.

Almost always tradition is nothing but a record and a machine-made imitation of the habits that our ancestors created. The average conservative is a slave to the most incidental and trivial part of his forefathers glory - to the archaic formula which happened to express their genius or the eighteenth-century contrivance by which for a time it was served.

Baseball has so much history and tradition. You can respect it, or you can exploit it for profit, but it's still being made all over the place, all the time.

Good, old-fashioned ways keep hearts sweet, heads sane, hands busy.

Comedians don't have hits. You have to have a whole brand-new hour. You have no hits to rely on.

The poet cannot invent new words every time, of course. He uses the words of the tribe. But the handling of the word, the accent, a new articulation, renew them.

Comedy Central wanted to do a show with me, I had a couple failures under my belt with them already, but they still wanted to try something else. They came to me and said they wanted to do something that was internet focused and created original content on their site, so they could compete with the funny or dies and what not. So that was the premise, and they gave us a small amount of money, $5000, and from there it turned into the show.

With a limited palette, the older painters could do just as well as today what they did was sounder.

The mathematician starts with a few propositions, the proof of which is so obvious that they are called self-evident, and the rest of his work consists of subtle deductions from them. The teaching of languages, at any rate as ordinarily practiced, is of the same general nature authority and tradition furnish the data, and the mental operations are deductive.

An artist who wants to transpose a composition onto a larger canvas must conceive it over again in order to preserve its expression; he must alter its character and not just fill in the squares into which he has divided his canvas.

He will find one English book and one only, where, as in the "Iliad" itself, perfect plainness of speech is allied with perfect nobleness; and that book is the Bible.

I kind of got inspired by [William] Wordsworth and [Samuel Taylor] Coleridge - I went the old traditional way of finding inspiration, I guess.

She would say, "Someone should invent something to do with things you cannot use anymore but that you still cannot throw out.

When you come up in the art world, whatevers in the air, the issues of the moment, end up becoming part of the working method or modus operandi of how you think about doing a painting. And I came up at a time when-actually painting was dead when I came up. Sculpture sort of ruled.

I got hit up for a tampon commercial and so I asked [JD and Jo] if they had anything. Jo sent that over and I was like, "I love this track. Oh my god. It's so upbeat. It's so positive. It would be so great for a tampon commercial." That commercial never came through, so then I just had it. I was like, "That would be great for a Hillary [Clinton] song." I think it's so funny that it could be a tampon commercial.

Acting is acting, but acting is different in almost always every project, and very, very different in this context.