Steven Knight Quotes

Life is complex. You don't have any person who is nice from the beginning until the end. You don't always have the notion of redemption. The bad people don't always pay.

No person and no character is beyond redemption, ultimately. That's the great thing about playing a character that has kind of a dark side; there's room to explore the opposite.

My favorite was 'The Secret Garden'. I loved it, and I think it's had a big influence on all of my characters. 'The Secret Garden' is about transgressions and imperfect people.

Chronic remorse, as all the moralists are agreed, is a most undesirable sentiment. If you have behaved badly, repent, make what amends you can and address yourself to the task of behaving better next time. On no account brood over your wrongdoing. Rolling in the muck is not the best way of getting clean.

But even with a character like Cary who is relatively outlandish, at the end of the movie he's in a place where I wouldn't have expected him to be - taking on the responsibility of a woman who is pregnant and who used to be his best friend's wife.

No matter how heinous someone's behaviour, if you make them a comic character, you can't expect people to hate them.

If I thought a man had never committed a sin in his life, I don't think I'd want to talk with him. A man with flaws is more interesting.

I'm finding, as I get older, that I'm not much of a believer in redemption. I mean, I believe in redemption in real life - redemption does happen, and it's cool when it does - but I find myself getting leery of my desire for it in stories (especially my own).

I really do believe that no one is too pious to fall or too far gone to be redeemed in some way. Jaime Lannister on 'Game of Thrones' did terrible things, and now I feel so bad for him because his sister won't kiss him. Isn't that weird? Does she not love him? He lost a hand! It kills me that I care.

Man's nature is not essentially evil. Brute nature has been known to yield to the influence of love. You must never despair of human nature.

You look at John Travolta in 'Pulp Fiction', you look at Donnie Wahlberg in 'The Sixth Sense.' People have liens against them in crazy ways and the audience is always forgiving - if you prove it.

There is no such thing as a saint without a past or a sinner without a future.

Time solves most of these things, and today, most people think he did the right thing.

Your characters can do the worst things on Earth - cut to a happy baby, it ends up being OK.

I try to show ugliness, but with compassion for the people who commit ugly acts.

I enjoy played flawed men who are pushed to the limit, who make mistakes and then have to recover.

The mark of our society as civilized will come when we embrace confidence in the power of redemption.

I think that people are fascinated with the stories, with human nature and the dark turns it can take.

Often, we have only focused on what we've done wrong as a nation. Of course we should face our sins and our mistakes. But if we get stuck there and don't focus on where we've come from and how we've overcome those sins and mistakes, we are truly to be pitied.

All I could do was try to build a new life and find a way somehow to repair some of the damage. People had every reason to doubt my sincerity, but most of them didn't. And - given my history, it was more than I could've hoped for - forgiveness and the benefit of the doubt. It still amazes me.

I looked at Robert Downey, Jr. and all these people - when you ask for redemption, people will give it to you. But if you're the boy who cried wolf, they'll destroy you.

I don't need to punish people for sin. Sin is its own punishment, devouring you from the inside. It's not my purpose to punish it; it's my joy to cure it.

I reached the point in my life now that I understand as human beings we've all done some very horrible things to other human beings, and at some point, I came to grips with the fact that whoever murdered my friend is now an adult, and all I can truly hopefully pray for is that in murdering my friend it bettered their life. And I don't mean that they gained things, but just that they grew up, they regret their decision, they found a place of spirituality or God or whatever people call it.

There are people we treat wrong and later, we're prepared to treat other people right.

Your business as a writer is not to illustrate virtue but to show how a fellow may move toward it or away from it.