Quotes from Ben Elton

I don't want to wait. I want to learn. I only have the rest of my life left and I need to make a start.

no society based on nothing more constructive than fear and brutish ignorance culd survive for ever. No people who raised up the least inventive, the least challenging, the least interesting of their number while crushing individual curiousity and endevour could prosper for long.

everybody thought that if only they could get in front of a camera they could show people the real them. Had they learned nothing from watching the very shows they aspired to be on? Could they not see that between them and the public whom they wished to influence stood the edit? And the edit would make of them what it pleased. It would not necessarily be brutal, it might as easily create a hero as a villain, but what it would never ever do was show anybody as they genuinely were.

A time when the miracles of technology were still virile and exciting: steam engines and flying machines, not smart phones and cosmetic surgery. When there were still wildernesses left to explore and mountains left unclimbed.

What a world, eh? Sometimes I wish I could just live somewhere on Radio 4.

It was as if food had been in monochrome and had suddenly appeared for the first time in colour.

Once more, and for the fourth time, the war would most definitely not be over by Christmas.

Oh yes, you know that men are dying, dying in their thousands day after day. Everybody knows that. But you don't know what it's like. You could spend the rest of your life trying to imagine it but you'd never get even close. …Let me tell you, Kingsley, nothing, no words in the English language or any other bloody language for that matter, could ever describe what it's like.

But these are only words and probably convey only a fraction of their meaning to the hearers. They shudder and it is forgotten.

I'm twenty-two and a woman. One of the ways men diminish women's status and our contribution whilst simultaneously entrenching their quasi-paternal male authority is to call us girls. Girls go to school, Captain. Women tend the wounded, make the shells and drive the ambulances.

Don't you just love the army? They take a fellow who's been turned into a catatonic mute by being shelled from here to Christmas and say he's not yet been properly diagnosed but he seems a bit nervous.

Christmas is the birth of our Saviour, McCluskey remarked. That must mean something, surely. The bastard never saved me. Maybe he hasn't finished with you yet.

Such a lot to have thrown away to please an unbalanced ruler and a few vicious old generals.

Never underestimate the anger of a woman who's fallen out of love.

No, not A reason. Reason itself. I want to work something out in my own mind. I want to arrive at a conclusion because I've thought it through, not because I've been told to believe it.

Never consider the bigger picture, because if you do you'll just give up. If you're hanging on a precipice, there's no point worrying that the precipice is in a desert five days from water. Just get out of the precipice, then worry about the water.

The classic private bitterness of the public zealot. A man who wanted to take out his own inadequacy on other people. And

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

Yes, OK, farty is a silly word. I wish I'd never used it. I'm 34. Perhaps it was a word for my 20s.

And roast beef and Yorkshire pudding is my personal signature dish.

There are lots of things I could have done for the money, but I've made a great living doing the things I want to do.

I think it is very difficult to legislate for morality.

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