Ben Elton Quotes

I'm easy to work with, not a pushover, but I respond to criticism and find it inspiring.

The internet was supposed to liberate knowledge, but in fact it buried it, first under a vast sewer of ignorance, laziness, bigotry, superstition and filth and then beneath the cloak of political surveillance. Now...cyberspace exists exclusively to promote commerce, gossip and pornography. And of course to hunt down sedition. Only paper is safe. Books are the key. A book cannot be accessed from afar, you have to hold it, you have to read it.

The Germans are a cruel race. Their operas last for six hours and they have no word for fluffy.

You didn't wake up, your dreams just changed gear.

People who get through life dependent on other people's possessions are always the first to lecture you on how little possessions count.

For the past seventeen years I have been experimenting with lager. I am a lager user and one drug leads to another. If you do lager, as night follows day, you'll end up doing Kentucky Fried Chicken.

Leaders should never, ever try to look cool - that's for dictators

The worst thing about being a great power is when you're not one any more. It takes centuries to get over it.

We've all got to look at ourselves, start with yourself, that's all you can do. I believe that we can act responsibly as a group, it's just that there are vested interests telling us not to bother.

I think it is very difficult to legislate for morality.

Artists don't create society, they reflect it

If only the strength of the love that people feel when it is reciprocated could be as intense and obsessive as the love we feel when it is not; then marriages would be truly made in heaven.

I find the fact that billionaires are quoted as if the fact that they are billionaires gives them some kind of wisdom is outrageous.

Any closer would unravel her mystery, the very thing which made her so truly beautiful...It was her mystery that he adored. He was in love with everything that he did not know about her... No real sexual encounter could ever match the secret one that he could nurture in his imagination... No living flesh could ever be the erotic equal of flesh kept private, untouchable and unknowable

The appropriation of radical thinking by lazy, self-obsessed hippies is a public relations disaster that could cost the earth.

Sympathy for victims is always counter-balanced by an equal and opposite feeling of resentment towards them.

Kingsley watched her disappear from the room, wondering if his heart would break. Logic informed him that of course it would not. The heart was no more than a muscle, a pump which distributed blood about the body.

Comedy will always be central to what I do, it's just an instinct for me, but I am a writer and always have been.

I resent the creation of a world in which beauty is a reminder of what we're losing rather than a celebration of what we have.

I exercise hard and the reason I do is so that I can earn the things I like to consume.

Beyond love, beyond unrequited love, perhaps even beyond any other passion known to humanity, deep, deep in the depths of the turgid, clinging, swamplike pit of despair that lies dormant within every soul, lurks JEALOUSY. Jealousy, that most demeaning and debilitating of emotions. Jealousy, which can double the strength of the love upon which it is based, but whilst doubling it, warp and pervert it, untill it is no longer recognizable as the thing of beauty it once was. Jealous love is no more like true love than Mr Hyde was like Dr Jekyll or a stagnant swamp is like a freshwater lake.

I don't know what people who I've never met think about me. Some have written horrible things, some have written nice things - but I'm proud of the fact I've remained close to everyone I've ever worked with.

I'm lucky because the strongest emotion I have ever felt is being in love, and that definitely informs my writing.

My parents were secular. I am an atheist.

I don't consider myself Jewish. I am half-Jewish by race but not through my mother.