Charlie Brooker Quotes & Sayings

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. — Charlie Brooker

Everyone had clearly spent far too long perfecting their appearance. I used to feel intimidated by people like this; now I see them as walking insecurity beacons, slaves to the perceived judgment of others, trapped within a self- perpetuating circle of crushing status anxiety. — Charlie Brooker

The difference between smartphones and cigarettes is this: a cigarette robs 10 minutes from your lifespan, but at least has the decency to wait and withdraw all that time in bulk as you near the end of your life - whereas a smartphone steals your time in the present moment, by degrees. Five minutes here. Five minutes there. Then you look up and you're 85 years old. — Charlie Brooker

Look at The King's Speech. For one thing, you can look at it: no lens caps left on there. What's more, the story is simple. The world's most important man can't speak properly, so he gets taught to speak properly. But then disaster strikes! It looks like he might not be able to speak properly after all. Finally, in a triumphant climax, he speaks properly. It's a feelgood ending for everybody, apart from the 450,000 Britons killed in the war he just announced on the radio. — Charlie Brooker

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. — Charlie Brooker

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 — Charlie Brooker

It's spider season. Every year, right about now, thousands of the godless eight-legged bastards emerge from the bowels of hell (or the garden, whichever's nearest) with the sole intention of tormenting humankind. — Charlie Brooker

At 38, I look back at my 32-year-old self and regret that he wasted time. Then I regret wasting my current time regretting regrets about regrets. This is pretty sophisticated regretting I'm doing. That's the sole advantage of ageing: I can now effortlessly consolidate my regrets into one manageable block of misery. Otherwise, by the age of 44, I'd need complex database software just to keep track of precisely how many things I'm regretting at once. — Charlie Brooker

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 — Charlie Brooker

We spend more time gazing at luminous screens than into the eyes of our loved ones. — Charlie Brooker

Wait, it gets duller. — Charlie Brooker

The internet's perfect for all manner of things, but productive discussion ain't one of them. It provides scant room for debate and infinite opportunities for fruitless point-scoring: the heady combination of perceived anonymity, gestated responses, random heckling and a notional "live audience" quickly conspire to create a "perfect storm" of perpetual bickering. — Charlie Brooker

The problem: affordable housing has to be subsidised, if the 'affordable' bit of the phrase is going to work. The solution: replace every wall, ceiling and floor with a gigantic plasma screen and charge for advertising space. The affordable living room of tomorrow is a futuristic cube with a perpetually looping Go Compare commercial in place of carpets and wallpaper. — Charlie Brooker

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

If you truly believe you need to pick a mobile phone that "says something" about your personality, don't bother. You don't have a personality. A mental illness, maybe - but not a personality. — Charlie Brooker

One of life's sorest tragedies is that the people who brim with confidence are always the wrong people. — Charlie Brooker

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. — Charlie Brooker

Man the lifeboats. The idiots are winning. — Charlie Brooker

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. — Charlie Brooker

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. — Charlie Brooker

She's got zero interest in honest-to-goodness human-on-human action. No. It's magic farmyard creatures or nothing for her. — Charlie Brooker

Celebrity' is increasingly the only role the media can process, — Charlie Brooker

Cupcakes are for people who can't handle reality. — Charlie Brooker

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. — Charlie Brooker

In these uncertain, unsettling times, with unpopular policies being implemented by a patchwork coalition of the damned, Nick Clegg is proving to be perhaps the most useful tool in the government's shed. Not because he says or does anything particularly inspiring, but because he functions as a universal disappointment sponge for disenchanted voters. You stare at Nick Clegg and feel infinitely unhappy, scarcely noticing Cameron and Co. hiding behind him. Governments around the world must be studying the coalition and working out how to get their own Clegg. He's the coalition's very own Pudsey Bear: a cuddly-but-tragic mascot representing the acceptable face of abuse. But unlike Pudsey, he actually speaks. — Charlie Brooker

Technology is a global thing and wherever you go, people are prodding the same devices and worrying in the same way and have had their lives slightly altered in the same way. — Charlie Brooker

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. — Charlie Brooker

Parties somehow represent the rationing of fun, and that very concept depresses me. You're allowed to act like a tit at parties; therefore by implication, you're not allowed to act like a tit the rest of the time — Charlie Brooker

Did I say 'aspect ratio'? Yes I did. And if you don't have a clue what I'm talking about, there's a very good chance your television at home is set to the wrong aspect ratio, in which case I'd like you to stop reading right now and punch yourself hard in the kidneys. — Charlie Brooker

On clubbers: They were all photographing themselves. In fact, that's all they seemed to be doing. Standing around in expensive clothes, snapping away with phones and cameras. One pose after another, as though they needed to prove their own existence, right there, in the moment. Crucially, this seemed to be the reason they were there in the first place. There was very little dancing. Just pouting and flashbulbs. — Charlie Brooker

Until recently, I was an ebook sceptic, see; one of those people who harrumphs about the "physical pleasure of turning actual pages" and how ebook will "never replace the real thing". Then I was given a Kindle as a present. That shut me up. Stock complaints about the inherent pleasure of ye olde format are bandied about whenever some new upstart invention comes along. Each moan is nothing more than a little foetus of nostalgia jerking in your gut. First they said CDs were no match for vinyl. Then they said MP3s were no match for CDs. Now they say streaming music services are no match for MP3s. They're only happy looking in the rear-view mirror. — Charlie Brooker

Your beautiful password is dead. It was simply too complex and too damned exquisite to live in your humdrum world, your humdrum mind. Now you must face the ignominy of clicking the password reset button for the 58th time this year. And as you trudge dolefully toward your inbox, waiting for the help letter to arrive, the cruel laughter of His Computerised Majesty rings in your ears. You have failed, human. You have failed.
— Charlie Brooker

Being slagged off is good for you. It thickens the skin and strengthens the backbone. — Charlie Brooker

Society? Can we trust us? Doubt it. We're probably not even real, as was revealed in the popular documentary The Matrix. That bloke next door? Made of pixels. Your co-workers? Pixels. You? One pixel. One measly pixel. You haven't even got shoes, for Christ's sake. — Charlie Brooker

Back in the 1930s, when men with handlebar moustaches played football in long johns and tails, and the ball was a spherical clod of bitumen, did fans weep in the stands when their team lost? No. They limited their responses to a muttered 'blast' or a muted 'hurrah' before going home to smoke a pipe and lean on the mantelpiece. — Charlie Brooker

Whenever I tell people I'm a misanthrope they react as though that's a bad thing, the idiots. I live in London, for God's sake. Have you walked down Oxford Street recently? Misanthropy's the only thing that gets you through it. It's not a personality flaw, it's a skill.
It's nothing to do with sheer numbers. Move me to a remote cottage in the Hebrides and I'd learn to despise the postman, even if he only visited once a year. I can't abide other people, with their stink and their noise and their irritating ringtones. Bill Hicks called the human race 'a virus with shoes', and if you ask me he was being unduly hard on viruses; I'd consider a career in serial killing if the pay wasn't so bad. — Charlie Brooker

Actually, perhaps they're just trying to remind themselves where they are. After all, sitting there with Jeremy [Kyle] and his iridescent pupils glistening before them, confronted by a studio audience so ugly they'd make John Merrick spew down the inside of his face-bag, the poor sods could be forgiven for forgetting they were on national television and starting to believe they were somewhere in the bowels of hell instead. — Charlie Brooker

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. — Charlie Brooker

DARK AGE LOSERS PROBLY USED TURNIPS FOR IPHONES LOL!!!! — Charlie Brooker

Extremist material of any kind always looks gaudy and cheap, like a bad pizza menu. Not because they can't afford decent computers - these days you can knock up a professional CD cover on a pay-as-you-go mobile - but because anyone who's good at graphic design is likely to be a thoughtful, inquisitive sort by nature. And thoughtful, inquisitive sorts tend to think fascism is a bit shit, to be honest. If the BNP really were the greatest British party, they'd have the greatest British designer working for them - Jonathan Ive, perhaps, the man who designed the iPod. But they don't. They've got someone who tries to stab your eyes out with primary colours.
— Charlie Brooker

Don't vajazzle our memories — Charlie Brooker

The internet. Can we trust in that? Of course not. Give it six months and we'll probably discover Google's sewn together by orphans in sweatshops. Or that Wi-Fi does something horrible to your brain, like eating your fondest memories and replacing them with drawings of cross-eyed bats and a strong smell of puke. There's surely a great dystopian sci-fi novel yet to be written about a world in which it's suddenly discovered that wireless broadband signals deaden the human brain, slowly robbing us of all emotion, until after 10 years of exposure we're all either rutting in stairwells or listlessly reversing our cars over our own offspring with nary the merest glimmer of sympathy or pain on our faces. It'll be set in Basingstoke and called, Cuh, Typical. — Charlie Brooker

A cupcake is just a muffin with clown puke topping. And once you've got through the clown puke there's nothing but a fistful of quotidian sponge nestling in a depressing, soggy 'cup' that feels like a pair of paper knickers a fat man has been sitting in throughout a long, hot coach journey between two disappointing market towns. — Charlie Brooker

Don't accuse anyone with the temerity to question your sad supernatural fantasies of having a 'closed mind' or being 'blind to possibilities'. A closed mind asks no questions, unthinkingly accepting that which it wants to believe. The blindness is all yours.[17 — Charlie Brooker

In summary, our world is doomed. — Charlie Brooker

Must be frustrating being a scientist. There you are, incrementally discovering how the universe works via a series of complex tests and experiments, for the benefit of all mankind - and what thanks do you get? People call you "egghead" or "boffin" or "heretic", and they cave your face in with a rock and bury you out in the wilderness.
Not literally - not in this day and age - but you get the idea. Scientists are mistrusted by huge swathes of the general public, who see them as emotionless lab-coated meddlers-with-nature rather than, say, fellow human beings who've actually bothered getting off their arses to work this shit out. — Charlie Brooker

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

I've instinctively hated the Tories since birth. — Charlie Brooker

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. — 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

Jittery, neurotic parents don't need any more false scares to piss their pants over. They're already raising their twatty little offspring like mollycoddled prisoners: banned from playing outdoors in case a paedophile ring burrows through the pavement and eats them, locked indoors with nothing but anti-bacterial plasma screens for company, ferried to and from school in spluttering rollcaged tanks ... Christ, half these kids would view choking to death as a release. — Charlie Brooker

I wish I enjoyed the World Cup, if only for some fleeting sense of common unity with the rest of humankind. But I simply don't get it. A huge number of my fellow citizens tune in and witness a glorious contest of ecstatic highs and heartbreaking lows. I see twenty-two millionaires fucking up a lawn. — Charlie Brooker

Technical in the social situation, sociable in the technical situation? That's the hallmark of a nerd. — Charlie Brooker

At the other end of the spectrum, George Gideon Oliver King Rameses Osborne, the fourteen-year-old novelty Chancellor and future baronet of Ballentaylor and Ballylemon - a man so posh he probably weeps champagne. — Charlie Brooker

In many ways, Big Brother is the present day equivalent of a 1980s Club 18-30 Holiday - flirting, sunbathing, silly little organised games, and lots of people you'd like to remove from the genepool with a cricket bat. — Charlie Brooker

Who do hats think they are? They contribute nothing to society, and don't even display basic manners. Has a hat ever held a door open for you? No. It hasn't.
— Charlie Brooker

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. — Charlie Brooker

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

Creationists reject Darwin's theory of evolution on the grounds that it is just a theory. This is a valid criticism: evolution is indeed merely a theory, albeit one with ten billion times more credence than the theory of creationism - although, to be fair, the theory of creationism is more than just a theory. It's also a fairy story. And children love fairy stories, which is presumably why so many creationists are keen to have their whimsical gibberish taught in schools. — Charlie Brooker

[Worshipping God] is like fellating someone who intermittently stubs fags out on your head for no good reason. And we all know how unsatisfying that can be. — Charlie Brooker

Heat magazine - the tittering idiot's lunchbreak-pamphlet-of-choice -
has caused a bad stink by printing a collection of comedy stickers in its latest issue. Said stickers are clearly designed to be stuck round the
fringes of computer monitors by the magazine's bovine readership in a desperate bid to transform their veal-fattening workstation pen into a miniature
Chuckle Kingdom and thereby momentarily distract them from the bleak futility of their wasted, Heat-reading lives — Charlie Brooker