Steven Knight Quotes

I went to film school so I have a writing and directing background, and I think a lot of the material I'm interested in writing and getting out there is stories about anti-heroes and people you should just not ordinarily root for - trying to figure out a way of appealing to people they wouldn't normally appeal to.

I'm just attracted to playing people who are ostensible unlikable. That's not to say that there's something in there that makes you care. It might be that you just find them so awful that you just can't stop watching, like a car crash.

Where typically the cops are generally the good guys, 'The Red Road' blurs the lines intelligently and shows corruption from all sides of the law. It provides unpredictable drama where the audience is kept guessing about how these characters will each choose to act.

I think fiction lends itself to messiness rather than the ideal, and plays well with the ironies surrounding what happens versus what should happen.

I'm attracted to playing people who aren't necessarily straightforward.

Some of my favorite shows are ones where the characters are vile and human and flawed. That's what makes me want to keep watching a show, not writers telling me how to feel about characters.

I'm attracted to those kinds of roles that could be good or could be bad, and you just don't know.

If you like a story that's totally different and won't know which way it's going... where it's go ing to end up and which way it's going to take you, then I think my work fits the bill.

A great literary work can be completely, completely unpredictable. Which can sometimes make them very hard to read, but it gives them a great originality.

I think the most appealing characters for the audience are the ones that you never know whether to root for them or whether to hate them. That's what keeps people drawn to their television sets.

'Transparent' was huge for me when I first saw it. I felt that, from an authorial point of view, no one was trying to sell characters to us, you know? It's the idea of not having to adore these characters and want to cuddle them; you just have to be into them and their psychology and be compelled by them.

That's what attracts me to the kind of characters I try and write - that they're not cut and dried.

I don't judge in my books. I don't have to have the antagonist get shot or the protagonist win. It's just how it comes out. I'm just telling a story.

Since I hold no judgments against my characters, no matter how heinous they might seem, I present them as real people with their own moral centers. We might feel those moral centers are mis-calibrated, but they are there and are the rudders that propel them. This makes reading my work a visceral roller coaster, 'cause the reader must embark on the journey of the protagonist equipped only with his or her own moral center.

If you want to write about a person who isn't nice, people say, "This is a bad book. It's about somebody I couldn't stand." But that's not the point. You don't have to like a character to like a book. Most of the time, people would misjudge and say, "I didn't like the book." No, you didn't like the character. That doesn't make it any less interesting of a book. In fact, to me, it makes it more interesting.

The fascinating thing about Game of Thrones is that none of the badasses are just badasses, and none of the wimps are just wimps. A coward will surprise you with courage, and a very powerful person will blindside you with weakness, and the most evil person is capable of the most compassionate moment.

No woman or man is any one thing and the men in my stories, well, some of them are good and some of them are terrible, and most of them make the lives of the women they love much harder than need be. Why? Because that's the kind of storytelling I was drawn to when I wrote these stories, most of which are at least seven years or more old.

As in all Abercrombie's books, friends turn out to be enemies, enemies turn out to be friends; the line between good and evil is murky indeed; and nothing goes quite as we expect. With eye-popping plot twists and rollicking good action, Half a King is definitely a full adventure.

That's to me what always is compelling about villains. I am much more interested in how they think than in what they even do.

You usually never know what you're going to do when you're making a movie.

It has to be said that the bad guys are often more interesting than the good guys because you get to indulge part of your nature that hopefully gets subsumed most of the time. But I just like playing interesting characters, and variety's the spice of that, as it is with life, I suppose.

For big Hollywood movies, I'm on the more character-driven side of the equation. So, TV is a natural place for me to be because you've got no choice, but to be character-driven.

Creative Endeavors are by their nature uncertain.

History is not the story of heroes entirely. It is often the story of cruelty and injustice and shortsightedness. There are monsters, there is evil, there is betrayal. That's why people should read Shakespeare and Dickens as well as history ~~ they will find the best, the worst, the height of noble attainment and the depths of depravity.