Quotes from Ben Elton

My parents were secular. I am an atheist.

No collection of people who are all waiting for the same thing are capable of holding a natural conversation. Even if the thing they are waiting for is only a taxi.

I think trying to be cool is the worst possible ambition - and I have never suffered from it.

If I did things for the money, I'd have done adverts in the 1980s, when I was hot enough to be offered them, and 'Police Academy 6,' which I was asked to write.

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

I try hard not to preach, but I get carried away, which is a mistake, but it's a risk worth running.

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

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.

The earth only has so much bounty to offer and inventing ever larger and more notional prices for that bounty does not change its real value.

My advice to anyone adapting a novel is that once they've read it and learnt to understand it, then they must throw it away and never look at it again!

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

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

I think trying to be cool is the worst possible ambition - and I have never suffered from 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.

This calls for a very special blend of psychology and extreme violence.

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.

No!" Jimmy protested.

You think I look like a teletubby?

Artists don't create society, they reflect it

Books are the key. A book cannot be accessed from afar. You have to hold it, you have to read it.

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

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; it had nothing whatsoever to do with a man's emotions. But if that was the case, why did it ache so?

When the phone rings at 2.15am in the morning it's unlikely to be heralding something pleasant. What chance is there of its being good news? None. Only someone bad would ring at such an hour. Or someone with bad news.

People had got used to the planet dying. They didn't care anymore, it had been lingering on for too long. The Earth was like some aged and slightly disgusting relative that just got sicker and sicker and yet refused to die. Requiring more and more attention, growing bigger tumours, bursting nastier sores and soiling its sheets ever more often. An embarrassment and an inconvenience, a constant reminder of family guilt.