16 Ben Elton Quotes

Ben Elton quotes

1. 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.

2. 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.

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

4. Things get shaped straight and thin for reasons of aerodynamics. Missiles and skyscrapers are shaped the way they are on the soundest principles of engineering, not as monuments to the dick. In fact, so is the dick. The dick is shaped like a dick because that is the most efficient shape for a dick to be. That's why it's dick shaped. I mean a dick shaped like a table would cause all sorts of practical spatial problems.

1. 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.

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

3. 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!

4. My parents were secular. I am an atheist.

5. 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.

6. I think it is very difficult to legislate for morality.

7. 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.

8. 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.

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

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

11. 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.

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