Steven Knight Quotes

When I was in advertising, I did a great deal of work on television commercials. A co-worker and I wrote a screenplay, which led to a few more screenplays, and some were optioned by production companies. I was advised to move to California but didn't want to make the move. I decided to use another form of storytelling, so I wrote a novel.

I think most Hollywood meetings are silly and I truly despise pitching. It's insane to expect someone to come in and tell you the story before they've written it, and buying an idea from someone who can explain it rather than write it is like choosing a mechanic based on his ability to draw a picture of your car's problem.

Every day, I learn something new. I think one of the most exciting things for a writer is to work on a TV show. It's like a novel. You have a really long time to develop and learn about the characters, and you can just really keep digging in deeper, every week.

I'm not sitting around thinking of ideas for TV shows.

Part of a writer's job is just spacing out, looking into the air and imagining things.

I started to write in 2001. I wrote the books for the fun of it. It was an old idea I had had since the nineties.

I have two ideas for novels at the moment, neither of them all that conventional, but I'm not ready to choose between them yet, let alone settle down to the process of writing.

It takes me two to three years to write a novel. A screenplay is 100 pages and takes five years.

I wanted to do screenwriting. That's what I went to school for, but my major was overfilled, and when I got 'The Daily Show', I was a semester away from officially starting my major, so I never started that in particular.

I would say, A, you can't really teach anyone how to write good characters, because it's something you have to teach yourself or already have innately in you as a storyteller, and, B, coming up with a good screenplay is a very, very small fraction of what it takes to be a good screenwriter.

I like movies. I've written screenplays as a sort of procrastination thing for me. Like I'll work for a couple months on this idea that's been kicking around and then like 30 pages in I'll just go try a novel because it's a lot easier. That's what I know. So why am I killing myself?

At the end of the day you do have to write a short novel beforehand, called a script, before you can make a movie.

The whole process of writing a novel is having this great, beautiful idea and then spoiling it.

I love making movies, I love the differentness of it, I love writing. But I've always liked television. I grew up on television.

There's no really other way to learn writing than by writing. So accelerate that as much as you can. The more you write, the better you'll get. What also helps, though, is walking away from broken stuff. Not everything's going to work. Killing two years of your life trying to resuscitate a dying novel, I don't know. Why not just write a different one? You'll have more ideas. You can't help having ideas.

That's the hard work of writing. The imagining.

It's much like writing a screenplay with someone else and that's how we view it, I think.

It's not so much that I got that idea at some point, it came up naturally because of the improvisational nature of the story I was telling.

I don't actually sit down and write, but I just have a lot of different ideas about films and making movies.

When I have an idea, it goes from vague, cloudy notion to 100,000 words in a heartbeat.

My novels aren't really generated by a single conceptual spark; it's more a process of many different elements that come together unexpectedly over a long period of time.

TV has gotten perhaps better than your average film script, but at the same time, it's fun to give it all you've got for a few months and produce a story.

My background was producing and writing and performing in television when I started out, and I really missed that, that whole creative process that comes from sort of 'me' storytelling.

My novels tend to come about from a fusion of two big ideas, creating a critical mass that then fissions, throwing off hundreds of other particles, riffs, tropes and characters.

When you're making TV, the last thing you want to do is watch TV. It's too much.