Ben Elton Quotes

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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 see dull people as projects ... to be reformed

I think it is very difficult to legislate for morality.

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.

Artists don't create society, they reflect it

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

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

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

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

I loved writing 'Two Brothers' more than anything else I have written. It's the first book I've written that I've always known I wanted to write. Having said that, it also kept me awake at nights.

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.

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

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

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.

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

You're mugging old ladies every bit as much if you pinch their pension fund

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

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.

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!

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

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

My parents were secular. I am an atheist.

You think I look like a teletubby?

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.

I did not vote Labour because they've heard of Oasis and nobody is going to vote Tory because William Hague has got a baseball cap.

With privilege comes responsibility, you must understand that. People expect us to lead by example and we shall not disappoint them.

To positively discriminate in favour of groups that have been negatively discriminated against in the past.

They were the Saturday Club, a secret society of which only the four of them were aware and which none other could join.

People in that crowd want to make poverty history, but NOT if they have to pay for it themselves