Charlie Brooker Quotes

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

The biggest teenage taboo is being strait-laced. It's easy to tell a researcher you went to a house party that turned into an orgy. It's less easy to say you like eating toast and watching QI.

My theory is that we used to have several personalities, and now we're encouraged to have one online.

Man the lifeboats. The idiots are winning.

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

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.

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

In summary, our world is doomed.

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.

Technology by default became the thing that was a new thing that had swept in and was altering it everything.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

I am neurotic, and I'm a worrier.

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.

"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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

I can worry about anything.

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

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.

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

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

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 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.