“I’ve never lost that freelance mentality. You can’t take a holiday because you’re worried the work will dry up.”
― Charlie Brooker
“The fashion industry is an immense cultural and social blight that only gets a free pass because its would-be detractors are scared it’ll start criticising their haircut.”
― Charlie Brooker
“I like technology, but ‘Black Mirror’ is more what the consequences are, and it doesn’t tend to be about technology itself: it tends to be how we use or misuse it. We’ve not really thought through the consequences of it.”
― Charlie Brooker
“If someone doesn’t respond to a phone call, I think they’ve died.”
― Charlie Brooker
“Is hacking ever acceptable? It depends on the motive.”
― Charlie Brooker
“If I ran a national burger franchise – which I don’t – I’d make it a rule that no two customers can be greeted with precisely the same words and that every third customer must be grossly insulted as a matter of course. Just to keep the atmosphere nice and lively. And to keep the staff laughing.”
― Charlie Brooker
“A cupcake is just a muffin with clown puke topping.”
― Charlie Brooker
“What’s odd about the selfie stick is that while it might faintly improve the photo you’ll post on Facebook, it definitely makes you seem like a shallow, awful clown to any bystanders in the humdrum physical space you’re posing in.”
― Charlie Brooker
“I liked ‘Making A Murderer,’ ‘Master of None.’ ‘Stranger Things’ I watched along with everyone else in the world. ‘Narcos,’ I really liked ‘Narcos’ a lot.”
― Charlie Brooker
“Like bankers, top footballers are massively overpaid, but at least you comprehend what they’re doing for the money.”
― Charlie Brooker
“If there’s no point, then there’s no point giving up.”
― Charlie Brooker
“If you’re living in a dystopia, you don’t necessarily want to look at another one.”
― Charlie Brooker
“I can’t imagine voluntarily standing beside an F1 track in the rain, watching motorised wedges plastered in corporate decals zooming past at 500mph.”
― Charlie Brooker
“We’re inseparable, games and I. If you cut me, I’d bleed pixels. Or blood. Probably blood, come to think of it.”
― Charlie Brooker
“Tinder is the ultimate gamification of romance. It’s ‘Pokemon Go’ for the heart.”
― Charlie Brooker
“My career path is like crazy paving – it goes all over the place.”
― Charlie Brooker
“I remember I was changing to one phone from another and going through my old contact details, and so I was having to delete duplicate numbers to make room, and up came the name of someone who died, and… it felt hard to delete the name.”
― Charlie Brooker
“When a monk takes a vow of silence, is he still allowed to post messages on the Internet? Chances are God won’t find out. Being ancient, God probably can’t work computers. He holds the mouse gingerly, like it’s made of fine china.”
― Charlie Brooker
“You can tell a lot about a person by the way they treat waiters and shop assistants, especially when you are one.”
― Charlie Brooker
“I haven’t always been the kind of man who plays videogames. I used to be the kind of boy who played videogames.”
― Charlie Brooker
“Games get a bad press compared with, say, opera – even though they’re obviously better, because no opera has ever compelled an audience member to collect a giant mushroom and jump across some clouds.”
― Charlie Brooker
“It’s hard to think of a single human function that technology hasn’t somehow altered, apart perhaps from burping. That’s pretty much all we have left.”
― Charlie Brooker
“We take miracles for granted on a daily basis.”
― Charlie Brooker
“’The Twilight Zone’ was sometimes shockingly cruel, far crueller than most TV drama today would dare to be.”
― Charlie Brooker
“People tend to think I’m a lot more earnest than I am.”
― Charlie Brooker
“When you’re being earnest, people think you’re being sarcastic, and when you’re being sarcastic, they think you’re being earnest. The moral in all this, of course, is that people should never attempt to communicate.”
― Charlie Brooker
“At 16, I was drawing cartoons, and I wanted to carry on being a cartoonist.”
― Charlie Brooker
“I can’t rank anything. I mean, how could anyone possibly say what their favourite piece of music is? I don’t have the ability or the desire to categorise things of that nature.”
― Charlie Brooker
“The sole purpose of a crown is to make anyone not wearing one feel like an insignificant pauper. They’re obscene to the point of satire.”
― Charlie Brooker
“I’ve scaled back my involvement with Twitter; it’s too easy to get dragged into an argument.”
― Charlie Brooker
“I liked that sort of thing, those one-off stories like ‘Tales of the Unexpected,’ ‘Hammer House of Horror,’ ‘The Twilight Zone’ and ‘Alfred Hitchcock Presents.’”
― Charlie Brooker
“I’m not anti-technology at all, really.”
― Charlie Brooker
“Videogames are probably my first love.”
― Charlie Brooker
“I remember when I realised, as a child, ‘That stuff on the TV about nuclear bombs is real! Why isn’t everyone running around shouting ‘Aaarrgghh’? Why are people still buying bicycle clips?’”
― Charlie Brooker
“I’m extremely neurotic; it’s the way my brain is built.”
― Charlie Brooker
“I used to draw comics a lot. I was obsessed with ‘The Young Ones,’ and was massively into video games, although I was no good at them.”
― Charlie Brooker
“I’ve got a phobia about throwing up.”
― Charlie Brooker
“I don’t know how, at an age when you’re trying to put your identity together, how you cope with the pressure of a performance space, which is what social media is.”
― Charlie Brooker
“I’m quite techy and gadgety.”
― Charlie Brooker
“Technology is a tool that has allowed us to swipe around like an angry toddler.”
― Charlie Brooker
“I’ve got no attention span.”
― Charlie Brooker
“I wanna do some more goofy comedy stuff; I really enjoyed doing ‘A Touch of Cloth.’”
― Charlie Brooker
“I’m looking forward to the ‘Twilight Zone’ from Jordan Peele… if anyone’s gonna reboot the ‘Twilight Zone,’ then there’s the man to do it.”
― Charlie Brooker
“I loved ‘Get Out.’”
― Charlie Brooker
“With ‘Hang the DJ,’ I was concerned that it was more comedic and much lighter than we normally do for ‘Black Mirror.’”
― Charlie Brooker
“On ‘Black Mirror,’ we don’t tend to deal with big, powerful people, because when you look at a Weinstein or something, you think, ‘Is he capable of feeling anything?’”
― Charlie Brooker
“The logical quandaries thrown up by well-meaning systems are clearly something that I find darkly amusing.”
― Charlie Brooker
“I think the problem we have as apes is we’re asking far bigger questions than we could possibly process.”
― Charlie Brooker
“In the age of social media, everyone’s a newspaper columnist, exaggerating what they think and feel.”
― Charlie Brooker
“Brexit is a harbinger for Trump, really.”
― Charlie Brooker
“Hopefully, some supervillain threat will come down, and we will have to unite as a species and fire our nukes into the sun or something.”
― Charlie Brooker
“People always assume I went to public school, which I didn’t, so that immediately puts me somewhere.”
― Charlie Brooker
“All Pixar movies are heartbreaking, aren’t they?”
― Charlie Brooker
“I have often felt the worlds of social media and the Internet are like a weird dreamscape. Even physically, when you are looking at your phone, you are out of it.”
― Charlie Brooker
“When you meet people you’ve interacted with on social media, they are not like they are on social media.”
― Charlie Brooker
“I’m scared about everything. I’m an anxious worrier. I worry about the downside of everything.”
― Charlie Brooker
“I can quickly go to a place where I worry about society spiralling out of control.”
― Charlie Brooker
“I do think that it’s a dysfunctional relationship between columnists and commentators, because they both seem to hate each other, like a terrible marriage.”
― Charlie Brooker
“There’s so much stuff flying around online, and it’s so easy to get into arguments with people.”
― Charlie Brooker
“When it comes to something like Brexit, I am part of the liberal-media London bubble, and so, to me, voting to leave was madness. My perspective was that it was cutting off your nose to spite your face.”
― Charlie Brooker
“There are different groups of people in your life that you behave slightly differently with. You behave one way with your family. You behave in a different way with your work colleagues. You behave differently with your friends from the movie club, your fitness instructor – all subtly different personas.”
― Charlie Brooker
“Online, you’re trying to appeal to everyone and people who you don’t know at the same time. So I think, as a side effect, it amplifies the desire for groupthink.”
― Charlie Brooker
“I do worry about civil unrest, or complete collapse of society, or having to flee, or Europe falling into a war.”
― Charlie Brooker
“I never really thought of myself as a TV critic. I was presenting TV before I was writing about it.”
― Charlie Brooker
“People bemoan the loss of watercooler chat, but I think that there’s more of that than ever. It’s just that it’s online.”
― Charlie Brooker
“Getting a moral lecture from the fashion industry is like Jeffrey Dahmer criticising your diet.”
― Charlie Brooker
“The fashion industry is the worst possible vessel for conveying an ethical message about anything.”
― Charlie Brooker
“Amplifying body-image issues, profiting from anxiety, and employing virtual slaves in sweatshops are bad enough, but the fashion industry is also actively hastening the destruction of the very Earth we walk on. It insists on launching fresh collections each season, declaring yesterday’s range obsolete on a whim.”
― Charlie Brooker
“Our metropolises are blighted by two problems: a lack of public transport and a lack of public loos.”
― Charlie Brooker
“My bookshelves chiefly function as a snapshot of what I was reading prior to the invention of the Kindle.”
― Charlie Brooker
“’MasterChef’ delivers all the reassuring, cadenced repetition of an endless chore without any of the bothersome elbow grease.”
― Charlie Brooker
“’MasterChef”s preliminary stages deliver just the right level of almost-drama for viewers feeling shagged out after a hard day’s fruitless existence.”
― Charlie Brooker
“My brain knows best-before dates are a con; my panicky gut treats them like a nuclear countdown.”
― Charlie Brooker
“It’s a remarkable pace of which things change and adapt, and it’s hard for us to keep up with as a species.”
― Charlie Brooker
“With Boris Johnson, you don’t think of him as a politician, oddly. You think of him as a media personality because he’s a comic character. He’s basically Homer Simpson. That makes him strangely bullet-proof.”
― Charlie Brooker
“We don’t sit down and look at the news pages and think, ‘How could we do an episode about that?’”
― Charlie Brooker
“God, people say ‘Black Mirror’ was horrible – it’s nothing compared to the stuff that happens in ‘Grimms’ Fairy Tales.’ It’s mind-bending.”
― Charlie Brooker
“If the Walkman had, by default, silently contacted your friends and told them what you were listening to, not only would no one have bought a Walkman in the first place, its designers would have been viewed with the utmost suspicion.”
― Charlie Brooker
“Humans will always babble. If someone wants to tweet that they can’t decide whether to wear blue socks or brown socks, then fair enough. But when sharing becomes automated, I get the heebie-jeebies.”
― Charlie Brooker
“Online, you play at being yourself.”
― Charlie Brooker
“We humans are great at creating tools with unforeseen consequences. For instance, when we invented the wheel, we had no way of knowing we were also laying the foundations for the TV show ‘Top Gear.’”
― Charlie Brooker
“Short of finding a place on the witness protection programme, you don’t get many opportunities to completely reinvent your life. Going to university changes that. Away from home, away from parents, away from anyone who remembers you from school, you can pretend to be far cooler and more experienced than you are.”
― Charlie Brooker
“I didn’t pass my degree due to never handing in an acceptable dissertation, and while it didn’t harm me in the long run, my failure to complete the course properly probably led me to spend the next six years or so coasting, unsure of what to do next.”
― Charlie Brooker
“In the early ’80s, the arcade game Pac-Man was twice as popular as oxygen.”
― Charlie Brooker
“Youth fare aside, I have generally always been interested in what’s going on culturally.”
― Charlie Brooker
“It must be awful, being a homophobe.”
― Charlie Brooker
“I’m no financial expert. I scarcely know what a coin is. Ask me to explain what a credit default swap is, and I’ll emit an unbroken 10-minute ‘um’ through the clueless face of a broken puppet. You might as well ask a pantomime horse.”
― Charlie Brooker
“The entire economy relies on the suspension of disbelief. So does a fairy story or an animated cartoon. This means that no matter how soberly the financial experts dress, no matter how dry their language, the economy they worship can only ever be as plausible as an episode of ‘SpongeBob SquarePants.’”
― Charlie Brooker
“Banking, as far as I can tell, seems to be almost as precise a science as using a slot machine. You either blindly hope for the best, delude yourself into thinking you’ve worked out a system, or open it up when no one’s looking and rig the settings so it’ll pay out illegally.”
― Charlie Brooker
“The majority of people are perfectly capable of interacting with retail staff without spitting on them or whipping their hides like dawdling cattle, but Planet Earth still harbours more than its fair share of disappointments.”
― Charlie Brooker
“What I disliked most about working as a shop assistant wasn’t the occasional snooty customer or the shop or the hours, but the way people reacted when I told them I was a shop assistant – their automatic assumption that I didn’t enjoy it.”
― Charlie Brooker
“Ever since about 1998, when humankind began fast-forwarding through the gradually-unfolding history of progress, like someone impatiently zipping through a YouTube clip in search of the best bits, we’ve grown accustomed to machines veering from essential to obsolete in the blink of a trimester.”
― Charlie Brooker
“If your home is anything like mine, it contains several rarely explored crannies stashed full of archaic chargers, defunct cables, and freshly antiquated gizmos whose sole useful function in 2011 is to make 2005 feel like 1926, simply by looking big and dull and impossibly lumpen.”
― Charlie Brooker
“Everyone’s opened a drawer and been startled by the unexpected discovery of an old mobile phone that now resembles an outsized pantomime prop. To think you used to be impressed by this clunky breezeblock. You were like a caveman gawping at a yo-yo.”
― Charlie Brooker
“Nothing happens in cricket, ever. Even the highlights resemble a freeze frame.”
― Charlie Brooker
“Apple excels at taking existing concepts – computers, MP3 players, conceit – and carefully streamlining them into glistening ergonomic chunks of concentrated aspiration.”
― Charlie Brooker
“I can’t imagine painting my face in a team colour and roaring with delight as a multi-millionaire kicks a ball at a net.”
― Charlie Brooker
“New Year’s resolutions work like this: you think of something you enjoy doing and then resolve to stop doing it.”
― Charlie Brooker
“Rather than setting yourself a New Year’s resolution, why not simply pick a reason for hating yourself for the next 365 days? Takes less time, and it’s easier to stick to.”
― Charlie Brooker
“Calling Batman ‘the Dark Knight’ is like calling Papa Smurf ‘the Blue Patriarch’:you’re not fooling anyone.”
― Charlie Brooker
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