Top 212 Quotes & Sayings by Charlie Brooker - Page 3

Many people find bald, unvarnished truths so disturbing, they prefer to ram their heads in the sand and start dreaming at the first sign of scientific reality.

Things like social media and the Internet, of course, it's not going away. There is no cure for it. And this shouldn't be just like there shouldn't be, you know - it would have been a tragedy if there was a cure for the printing press. I think it's just that it's an amazing tool that we as a - as an animal are just getting to grips with because it's like we've grown a new ultra powerful limb and we're learning how to use it.

Your grades are not your destiny: they're just letters and numbers which rate how well you performed in one artificial arena, once.

Whenever anything nice happens in the world I always expect something appalling to happen immediately afterwards.

Most writers or performers walk around with the notion in their head that - a paranoid worry that maybe people don't like them.

Men Against Jive is a brilliant title! That's a military story, that's a difficult one to explain really because that's sort of a war... it's not just a war story.

Everyone had clearly spent far too long perfecting their appearance. I used to feel intimidated by people like this; now I see them as walking insecurity beacons, slaves to the perceived judgment of others, trapped within a self- perpetuating circle of crushing status anxiety.

People gravitate towards their own era, nostalgia therapy is a real thing that's being tinkered with.

It's interesting, in the U.K., I'm known for doing comedy things, which often doesn't translate to the U.S.

Am I living in a simulation?

In a weird way, when everyone's feeling that the world's going to hell in a hand basket, I kind of relax a little more because I often feel like that.

In the U.K. I'm probably better known as a comedy writer - or certainly that's my background is in writing comedy.

In many ways, Big Brother is the present day equivalent of a 1980s Club 18-30 Holiday - flirting, sunbathing, silly little organised games, and lots of people you'd like to remove from the genepool with a cricket bat.

I did once leave one of [my kid] watching something on YouTube, something completely innocuous, and I went out of the room and the algorithm kept playing the next thing and the next thing and somehow worked its way around to showing him the trailer for John Carpenter's The Thing - at which point I walked back in. He wasn't happy.

In summary, our world is doomed.

"Proper work" usually involves performing a task you hate on behalf of people you'd gleefully club to death with a bull's knee if only it were legal to do so.

I'm trying to think overall. Some of our stories [Black Mirror], I think you're right in that they don't tend to have a message.

[The rumor that David Cameron maybe once did this unspeakable thing with a pig's head] it was freakish and weird. It seemed such a coincidence that I couldn't quite process it. And then, as it sank in, I genuinely had the thought, "Am I living in a Truman Show sort of VR simulation designed to send me insane?"

I am neurotic, and I'm a worrier.

I'm convinced no one actually likes clubs. It's a conspiracy. We've been told they're cool and fun; that only "saddoes" dislike them. And no one in our pathetic little pre-apocalyptic timebubble wants to be labelled "sad" - it's like being officially declared worthless by the state. So we muster a grin and go out on the town in our millions.

Our four-year-old, like a lot of kids, you introduce him to an iPad and he quite quickly gets drawn in in a way that you're like, "Wow, I've got to stage an intervention here." He picked up on gaming terminology really quickly. If you say, "Keep practicing holding a pencil and see if you can draw a letter, the alphabet," he understands that if you do that you've unlocked Level Two.

A sort of angry populism here in the UK and across Europe, a sort of anti-political mood and what then steps into that place? In one episode [of Black Mirror] you won't have seen, there's a very simple gaming gadget that turns out to be a monstrous idea, which I suspect we will end up doing for real.

I tried to be all intellectual and erudite and with others I'd just swear and curse and be an idiot. And suddenly, when they're all in one space, I don't know who I am.

I think overseas viewers assume that Black Mirror is written by the Unabomber, essentially - a Ludd­ite, technology-hating, angry old man waving his fist at the App Store.

What happens often is the script is written and once the director comes on board you have lots of conversations and it mutates again.

You sort of perform your personality, I guess, to everyone on some level.

I pitched Jay Hunt the opening scene (prime minister, middle of the night, he's woken up...). She paused, and then she laughed. She was very intrigued and all that, and then she said, "Does it have to be a pig?" So we went through various options: Could it be a supermarket frozen chicken? A giant wheel of cheese? A pig seemed just the right level of absurd, but then when he walks in and there's actually a pig there, it's awful.

The iPad falls between two stools - not quite a laptop, not quite a smartphone. In other words, it's the spork of the electronic consumer goods world.

Hi-def is merely the latest in a string of evolutional leaps that have transformed the way we sit slumped in front of a box wishing we were dead.

At the other end of the spectrum, George Gideon Oliver King Rameses Osborne, the fourteen-year-old novelty Chancellor and future baronet of Ballentaylor and Ballylemon - a man so posh he probably weeps champagne.

Generally I know that we've hit on a good idea if there's a moment where I'm going "HA HA HA!" because that's usually my starting point, me laughing.

[Black Mirror] is always about unforeseen consequences and unforeseen problems, it's not usually that someone's created a machine that they want to enslave mankind with, it's someone's invented a new kind of... paperweight that enslaves mankind.

Overall, looking at the stories [Black Mirror], almost every story we've ever done is concerned with authenticity or reality in some way.

When I was a chain smoker, I used to wake up and the first thing I'd do was reach for a cigarette, basically. And now I do the same thing for a smartphone, basically.

Online you're encouraged to perform one personality for everyone.

Creationists reject Darwin's theory of evolution on the grounds that it is "just a theory". This is a valid criticism: evolution is indeed merely "a theory", albeit one with ten billion times more credence than the theory of creationism - although, to be fair, the theory of creationism is more than just a theory. It's also a fairy story. And children love fairy stories, which is presumably why so many creationists are keen to have their whimsical gibberish taught in schools.

If love were a product, the queue at the faulty goods desk would stretch right round the universe and back. It doesn't work properly. The seams come apart and it's full of powdered glass.

In comedy writing, a sitcom plot is basically the same thing: What's the worst thing that could happen? But you're playing it for comic effect. It's a similar muscle being used with Black Mirror.

That's not something that we've gone in thinking 'Right! How are we going to examine that now?' It's just when you take a step back you see that they're actually all sort of in that mode.

There's something I find very satisfying about a nice ironic twist.

[One of my kids ]is not named after Aldous Huxley. I haven't even read Brave New World!

I'm terrible at reading fiction. I don't have the attention span - it's awful.

I think people are starting to look away and questioning, and they're sort of horrified.

What we were also trying to do is vary the tone slightly across the season of Black Mirror, because there are six stories this time around, so you don't want it to just be the devastating, bleak-em-up.

[My parents when I was a kid] would go, "It's a nice hot day. Why are you inside watching the TV?" And you go, "Well, 'cause it's better?"

I think somebody's marketing a thing that Hoovers up your Twitter and it will continue tweeting for you after you're dead. I have no idea whether they saw "Be Right Back" or not.

I've instinctively hated the Tories since birth.

Most of the books I read these days are children's books at bedtime.

What are people going to expect when they sit down to watch a new episode of Black Mirror? And what you're going to expect is somebody with a translucent TV in a drone strike and a robot walking by... or frowning at a phone and going 'aaah! Oh no! I've just deleted my own leg!' or whatever. So I thought well, let's not do that.

I actually had that conversation with [Channel 4 Chief Creative Officer] Jay Hunt. We were at a bit of a crisis point. I'd written a totally different script - about war, basically - that got rejected at the last minute for various reasons. The whole of the series was in doubt. I said, "Well, there is one other idea ["National Anthem"]."

Being slagged off is good for you. It thickens the skin and strengthens the backbone.

I mean, sometimes we do do that, The National Anthem was a caustic satire and sometimes that's the way to go with the story rather than me being particularly misanthropic.

I kept saying I want to do an episode that's set in the past, how do we do a period episode of Black Mirror? And simultaneously there was another idea we were thinking about and the two things sort of gelled and became San Junipero.

Technology isn't the villain and the people aren't often really the villain so much as they're weak.

I really don't want to sound like overly negative or critical of the Internet in general because I'm actually really quite pro-technology.

I've always had a bad attention span.

You don't have the economy of scale of building a set once and casting once. You blow up the world, basically, at the end of each episode.

My kids are very young. I'm sure there's a world of horror for me to worry about as they get older.

"National Anthem" was just a funny idea I'd been knocking about. I initially thought about a beloved celebrity having to do that - and then I watched an episode of 24. In my head, I was writing almost a parody of a 24-style president woken in the middle of the night with a crisis. It seemed more interesting to play it ultrastraight and to have the viewer's initial reaction be one of laughter and disbelief - and just have the whole thing become progressively more uncomfortable.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, which is a pity because this week the National Association of Beholders wrote to tell me that I've got a face like a rucksack full of dented bells.