Charlie Brooker Quotes

'Black Mirror' is definitely my favorite show.

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.

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.

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.

When 'American Pie' happened, I was so lucky to get that opportunity and I just tried to do a good job in that genre. But the films that inspired me as a kid were, like, Malcolm McDowall in 'A Clockwork Orange.' He was my hero.

'Blade Runner' was a comic strip. It was a comic strip! It was a very dark comic strip. Comic metaphorically.

There's a good chance that in 40 years, after the floods, people zipping by on scavenged jetpacks with their scavenged baseball caps on backwards, I will be in my rocking chair saying bitterly, 'I remember when 'all right' was two words.'

I'm looking at some comedic horror films because I have often been accused of being too dark. I'm not dark, not compared with 'Saw' or anything like that. So I'm looking at live-action horror films, but not slasher ones - ones that have humor and maybe some social satire.

Duncan Sheik and I are trucking along on 'American Psycho,' which is sort of the anti-Superman, you know? But it's a lot of fun, too, in a much, much darker way, obviously.

If I could require the president to read one book, it would be Cormac McCarthy's "The Road". I gives a sense of the fragility of the world. Plus each sentence is very short -- about the length of a tweet.

I think what's so brilliant about 'Black Mirror' is that it is a mirror into our own messed-up psyches.

Vladimir Nabokov liked to examine cruelty and the human condition. That didn't mean he was cruel; there's no evidence he kicked puppies just for the fun of it. Similarly, 'Black Mirror' likes to examine possible dystopias, but that doesn't mean the show is cynical enough to endorse them.

I do like 'The Truman Show.'

'The Twilight Zone' was sometimes shockingly cruel, far crueller than most TV drama today would dare to be.

'Black Mirror' obviously has its own universe, with a very strong fingerprint and strong themes, and I was intrigued on reading. It's such a powerful piece of storytelling.

I love 'Black Mirror.'

The comedy of each age holds up a mirror to the people of that age, a mirror that is unique.

I saw an episode - the second episode [of Black Mirror], "Fifteen Million Merits" - and I completely flipped out: "This is what my nightmares are made of. This is the most terrifying thing I've ever seen."

You are always looking at people like this.” And then she made a face, one he couldn’t possibly begin to describe. “If I ever look like that,” he said dryly, “precisely like that, to be more precise, I give you leave to shoot me.

Comedy is a blood sport. It flays the truth and spurts twisted logic. In America, people become comics because we don't have bullfighting.

Write to amuse? What an appalling suggestion! I write to make people anxious and miserable and to worsen their indigestion.

It's a new art form, showing people how little we care.

I read everything of Ray Bradbury when I was 12 or 13, and I think that's the most effective time to read Bradbury. He built such a moral world, where you have to make decisions and grow up.

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.

My work holds up the mirror to hypocrisy, which puts me in a tradition of American writing that reaches back to Nathaniel Hawthorne.