Top 212 Quotes & Sayings by Charlie Brooker - Page 4

It's a barrel of laughs, isn't it? It makes The Day After look like friggin'...insert name of cheerful thing here. It was one of the things that made me really worry about worst-case scenarios. There's something impish and probably somewhat therapeutic about thinking about those things.

I would say the thing you can still see in Black Mirror is that I was probably traumatized by the specter of nuclear war. I was born in 1971, and in the '80s I came to understand that I was inevitably going to be frazzled to death in the nuclear apocalypse.

My wife made me watch this documentary about the Iraq War, and there was a really powerful moment where they followed some civilian whose family had been killed. This was 5 or 10 minutes of this woman talking, and it was extremely arresting. You realize how you never hear from the person on the receiving end of a war without a reporter stepping in to compartmentalize the story. Usually they're just a few shots at the end of a news report, wailing and screaming at a funeral.

I could worry about pretty much anything you put in front of me, so I'm not actually sort of anti-technology. So it doesn't sort of come out of that. It's not like a fear of the future. It's a fear of everything.

I'm not some anti-technology person. I think it's often how people would assume that if they don't know me.

I can worry about anything.

Often the ideas in the show start out as ideas that make you laugh - outrageous "what if" ideas. I wanted an outlet for doing those.

I'm a worrier. In the UK, if I'm known for anything, it's sort of for being cynical.

On the other hand [making a string of one-off episodes], there's a real freedom, because you're kind of reinventing the show every week.

Technology is a global thing and wherever you go, people are prodding the same devices and worrying in the same way and have had their lives slightly altered in the same way.

The logic for me, in writing it is that the different areas or different years are almost like different rooms.

I wasn't really aware they were a religious organization for quite some time. But my grandparents were very devout and ran a Quaker meetinghouse and were missionaries at one point.

What is useful about when there is a sort of pull-out to reveal moment going on is that it actually focuses the mind when you're writing the earlier scenes because you're thinking 'right, how do I? I can only show this amount of the room... I can only show these characters from the waist up because they've all got robot legs!' it's a challenge so it keeps you engaged on some level.

I grew up in the countryside . But there's a danger of us romanticizing that. Because when I was a kid in 1982, that's what my parents were saying to me about television and comics and computer games!

I'm quite geeky and I'm very much into video games and technology and stuff like that.

I could worry that I'm going to bleed to death, you know, from cutting my finger on a sandwich packet, you know, if I sort of open a sandwich.

Obviously, you try not to repeat yourself so that forces you to re-evaluate what you're doing constantly [in Black Mirror].

'Waldo' was one episode I always felt I didn't quite crack. And weirdly, now that feels like one of the more prescient ones.

I was more aware initially of shows like Tales of the Unexpected. And the BBC used to put on a lot of one-off, bizarre television plays.

I'll just immediately automatically, without even thinking, check my phone. And it feels like the same little bit of my brain is being - the synapses are lighting up when I do that.

My continuum? Blimey! For me,Black Mirror is all part of the whole.

As long as we've still got crazy "what if" ideas, we can continue [Black Mirror]. It's outpacing reality that's probably the challenge.

[British television series] Hammer House of Horror. I used to really enjoy these one-off stories where often there would be an incredibly cruel twist. A good example is the episode with Burgess Meredith and there's a nuclear war and he drops his glasses. To this day, you can show that to anyone and they'll go "Bwrrrrrrrr!" You know, sort of wander away shuddering.

In Britain people might know me more for my comedy writing background, things like that.

I saw The Twilight Zone for the first time when I was 12 or 13. I used to stay up late to watch.

I'm more pro-technology than people probably realize.

We take things that would have struck us as miraculous five years ago for granted. Like Pokémon Go would have been insane, and now it's just like, "Oh, okay."

"Be Right Back," in which Hayley Atwell brings Domhnall Gleeson back from the dead using his social-media profile, sprang out of an unrelated conversation. Other stories you thrash away at for weeks and weeks.

I'm known as being a massive dweeb who's into video games and so on.

I suppose kids probably know less boredom these days - or at least a different kind of boredom.

While I was thinking about that, the military, I read a book called On Killing, about the obstacles people have to pulling the trigger in combat. So sometimes you just absorb all this stuff without realizing you were doing research.

One of the benefits of aligning yourself with an indistinct cluster of people is that claiming to feel their pain is often enough.