Charlie Brooker Quotes

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

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.

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

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

When you look at things like social media, that's an immensely powerful tool that I'm all in favor of. I think it's amazing. It's a powerful tool, and it's one that we're, as a species, still grappling with learning to use. It's like we've grown an extra tail and we inadvertently lash out and knock over all of the furniture.

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."

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Women - why aren't you running the world yet? Frankly I'm disappointed in you. Men are still far too dominant for their own good, and consequently we've made a testosterone-sodden pig's ear of just about everything: politics, the economy, religion, the environment ... you name it, it's in a gigantic man-wrought mess.

The news might be single-handedly trying to bring about an environmental catastrophe, which it will then report on. Super injunctions are interesting legal weapons really, they don't just gag the press, they gag them from mentioning the existence of the gag. Sport belongs in a news bulletin about as much as a mummified cat's head belongs in a Caesar salad. Combine the "mounting pressure" with the "growing cause" and you've got yourself a "media whirlwind" which you can also refer to.

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.

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

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

Man the lifeboats. The idiots are winning.

[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?"

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

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

Am I living in a simulation?

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

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"]."

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.

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

I've instinctively hated the Tories since birth.

Seriously, if I switched on the TV and they were showing live footage of an army of fire-breathing pterodactyls machine-gunning people to death on the streets of London right outside my door, I'd be horrified, but not entirely surprised, nor any more scared than I already am. I'd probably just shrug and wait for them to smash the door down. We're so screwed, I don't even know what to worry about first.

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.

I've always had a bad attention span.

We've got characters in the UK like Boris Johnson, who's kind of like a proto Trump in many ways even down to the crazy blonde hair. Then Mayor of London, now Foreign Secretary, Boris Johnson was widely seen as a cartoonish oaf and that made him strangely undentable as a politician. No one could land a blow on him because he was already ridiculous.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

"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.