Charlie Brooker Quotes

Part of the fun is finding out how elastic that box is and, you know, test the limits of what TV shows can do or what a music video can do.

I always have a feeling you should move the playing field and the minute you know what you're doing, you're wrong. Therefore, I wanted us not to try to follow Spamalot immediately, but to do something different. This is perfect because it uses all the same skills, like story telling and lyric writing and music writing, but it's presenting it in a different form. And of course it gives me and John a nice chance to perform and show off which is also fun.

My only two constants are to challenge myself and to try not to repeat myself.

Good storytelling for me is not so much technical expertise, which I know is applauded often; it's actually freshness of approach. It does mean you sometimes stumble and fall and make a horrible mess of things in seeking that freshness, but you should always keep trying to do that.

I have an almost complete disregard of precedent, and a faith in the possibility of something better. It irritates me to be told how things have always been done. I defy the tyranny of precedent. I go for anything new that might improve the past.

I wouldn't say I'm a very original thinker, but if I have a good experience with something, I'll want to take it further or adapt it in some way.

If you stick with a vision, it might not all work, but some of it will be absolute genius. To me, 15 minutes worth of absolute genius in a film is so much better than two hours of mediocrity. I would rather pay to see something different like that.

I learned from my dad that change and experimentation are constants and important. You have to keep trying new things.

I originated my own cliches, but I'm finding that's not working for me anymore.

I am somebody who... - I'm not saying I'm perfect, but I need that freedom, that ability to make mistakes out there. Because there's a fine line between making a mistake or being brilliant.

If you're not failing every now and again, it's a sign you're not doing anything very innovative.

We often say that the biggest job we have is to teach a newly hired employee to fail intelligently... to experiment over and over again and to keep on trying and failing until he learns what will work.

Design is the courage and brilliance to cover an original and make it different.

It's all about risk-taking when you're making an album. Don't be scared to do weird things sometimes.

I make records with an open mind, I always have.

Since I was in my early twenties, at ABC, I was always only interested in things that were not already being done.

If you look at the most meaningful science fiction, it didn't come from watching other films. We seem to be in a place now where filmmakers make films based on other films because that's where the stimuli and influence comes from.

If you do something new, it will always look a little bit strange.

Everyone is trying to do something that hasn't been done and that's a really good thing. You can only do so much with a story and some scripts don't give you the opportunities and other scripts do give you the opportunities to do things that haven't been done before.

It's so important to me that I feel like I'm doing something that's never been done before, whether that's in the show, or I'm writing a song. I can exist in this little box here, but I have to do something new with it.

I tend to just do whatever I want on an album and try to make it work. I'm just adventurous. It's most exciting to be at the edge of your abilities. I want to see how far I can push things.

A lot of things you just stumble into: relationships or ways of putting characters opposite one another that really worked. So then it's not always so much about imitating other people, but imitating yourself, at least in your thinking.

There's real peril in trying to repeat yourself, and apply rules that applied to something else to a new project.

I think we always move from imitation to assimilation to innovation, but I can't name you 20 people outside those we've already recognized who ever got to point three: innovation.

The problem as you get older... is that you become more self-aware. At the same time, you have to surprise yourself. There's no way of arranging the surprise, so it is tricky.