Charlie Brooker

“It's spider season. Every year, right about now, thousands of the godless eight-legged bastards emerge from the bowels of hell (or the garden, whichever's nearest) with the sole intention of tormenting humankind.”

“Hopefully, some supervillain threat will come down, and we will have to unite as a species and fire our nukes into the sun or something.”

“New Year's resolutions work like this: you think of something you enjoy doing and then resolve to stop doing it.”

“Technology is a tool that has allowed us to swipe around like an angry toddler.”

“'MasterChef' delivers all the reassuring, cadenced repetition of an endless chore without any of the bothersome elbow grease.”

“We take miracles for granted on a daily basis.”

“Games get a bad press compared with, say, opera - even though they're obviously better, because no opera has ever compelled an audience member to collect a giant mushroom and jump across some clouds.”

“If your home is anything like mine, it contains several rarely explored crannies stashed full of archaic chargers, defunct cables, and freshly antiquated gizmos whose sole useful function in 2011 is to make 2005 feel like 1926, simply by looking big and dull and impossibly lumpen.”

“I'm no financial expert. I scarcely know what a coin is. Ask me to explain what a credit default swap is, and I'll emit an unbroken 10-minute 'um' through the clueless face of a broken puppet. You might as well ask a pantomime horse.”

“We don't sit down and look at the news pages and think, 'How could we do an episode about that?'”

“'The Twilight Zone' was sometimes shockingly cruel, far crueller than most TV drama today would dare to be.”

“I don't know how, at an age when you're trying to put your identity together, how you cope with the pressure of a performance space, which is what social media is.”

“One of life's sorest tragedies is that the people who brim with confidence are always the wrong people.”

“I didn't pass my degree due to never handing in an acceptable dissertation, and while it didn't harm me in the long run, my failure to complete the course properly probably led me to spend the next six years or so coasting, unsure of what to do next.”

“...we spend more time gazing at luminous screens than into the eyes of our loved ones.”

“You can tell a lot about a person by the way they treat waiters and shop assistants, especially when you are one.”

“If you're living in a dystopia, you don't necessarily want to look at another one.”

“Amplifying body-image issues, profiting from anxiety, and employing virtual slaves in sweatshops are bad enough, but the fashion industry is also actively hastening the destruction of the very Earth we walk on. It insists on launching fresh collections each season, declaring yesterday's range obsolete on a whim.”

“I remember I was changing to one phone from another and going through my old contact details, and so I was having to delete duplicate numbers to make room, and up came the name of someone who died, and... it felt hard to delete the name.”

“People always assume I went to public school, which I didn't, so that immediately puts me somewhere.”