Life & Wisdom Quote by Nigel Kneale

A line like this isn’t just artistic pride; it’s a defensive maneuver against television’s built-in gravity toward compromise. Nigel Kneale, a writer who helped define British TV’s eerie, rationalist strain (The Quatermass Experiment, The Stone Tape), knew the medium could swallow authors whole: committees, schedulers, sponsors, and the soft tyranny of “what plays well.” By vowing to do only “my own stories,” he draws a bright line between authorship and employment. The phrase “made a rule for myself” is tellingly private and self-policing, as if the real enemy isn’t merely the network but the temptation to take the easy gig and let someone else’s vision set the terms.

The subtext carries a quiet contempt for the prestige ladder. In Kneale’s era, television was still treated as the junior sibling of theatre and film, and writers were often expected to be grateful to be there. Kneale flips that dynamic: TV doesn’t get to use him as a pair of hands; it has to meet him at the level of original imagination. There’s also a practical aesthetic embedded in the rule. Kneale’s best work depends on a specific tone: plausible institutions, intelligent characters, dread that creeps in through everyday technology. That kind of atmosphere doesn’t survive well when you’re servicing an existing property or sanding down edges to fit a “format.”

So the intent is autonomy, but the effect is bigger: a manifesto for television as a writer’s medium, not a pipeline for content.