Best 106 quotes of Charlie Brooker on MyQuotes

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

"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.

[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.

[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.

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.

Don't accuse anyone with the temerity to question your sad supernatural fantasies of having a 'closed mind' or being 'blind to possibilities'. A closed mind asks no questions, unthinkingly accepting that which it wants to believe. The blindness is all yours.

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.

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.

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.

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"].

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 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.

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.

If technology is a drug – and it does feel like a drug – then what, precisely, are the side-effects?

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 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.

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.

I'm actually quite pro-technology, but I'm a worrier, so I like to envision worst-case scenarios.

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.

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

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

I'm somewhat socially inept. Slide me between two strangers at any light-hearted jamboree and I'll either rock awkwardly and silently on my heels, or come out with a stone-cold conversation-killer like, "This room's quite rectangular, isn't it?" I glide through the social whirl with all the elegance of a dog in high heels

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

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

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.

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.

In summary, our world is doomed.

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

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.

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

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

I think more and more people became aware that social media was starting to feel like a more toxic space. And, I mean - quite a lot of incidents of people getting very, very angry about all kinds of things and attacking people.

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.

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

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 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.

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.

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

I've always had a bad attention span.

I've instinctively hated the Tories since birth.

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 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.

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.