Nigel Kneale Quotations

All stories should have some honesty and truth in them, otherwise you're just playing about.

People who believe in flying saucers are the scrapings from the bottom.

The trick is the paradox - turning your story inside out. Now if it is something that appears to be of total normality and then suddenly turns inside out and is a different thing all together then that's fun to write.

You get to Hollywood and you are in the land of big money where they don't like to see only one screenwriter's name. It's much better if you've got four or five.

You set up a story and it turns inside out and that is, for me, the most exciting sort of story to write. The viewer thinks it's going to be about something and it does the opposite.

Nothing could be recorded in those days except by aiming a movie camera at the television screen. It was at least another 10 years before they had any kind of recording medium.

I don't judge other people's work and I don't see enough of it either.

I never really saw myself as writing science fiction anyway.

Big Brother sounded like a silly stunt and that's what it is.

I made a rule for myself that the only television things I would do would be my own stories.

I reckon I closed down at least two films companies, one of which was in Ealing in the mid 1950s.

I wanted to write a story that demanded the viewer's attention.

I'd never seen any television before I started.

I'm in my 80s and not a keen television fan.

Something like The Haunting is not worth the slightest consideration from me.

The only folk I can judge are people like Woody Allen who I think is a genius, largely because I think he has beaten the system. He has his own company, and his films are all his own ideas. It's his direction, and so it comes out the way he imagined it.

Certainly, it isn't a ghost story where people go into a haunted house. There have been two or three made on that basis, but I didn't want to do that.

I'd written a book of short stories that had won the Somerset Maugham prize so I was respectable, but there was no money in short story writing.

I always put humour into my stories because if you construct a horrific scene of some kind you have to balance that with an equal quantity of humour.

I like inventing stories. Very often it's exciting to write about an imaginary future based on trends, you work out what things could wind up as.

I prefer doing original scripts because I totally control the story - it's all mine. Films don't work like that but television does.

What can there be concerning outer space but ignorance?