Ben Elton
Ben Elton was born on 3 May 1959, in Catford, South London. The youngest of four, he went to Godalming Grammar school, joined amateur dramatic societies and wrote his first play at 15. He wanted to be a stagehand at the local theatre, but instead did A-Level Theatre Studies and studied drama at Manchester University in 1977.
His career as both performer and writer encompasses some of the most memorable and incisive comedy of the past twenty years. His ground breaking work as a TV stand-up comedian set the (high) standard of what was to follow. He has received accolades for his hit TV sit-coms, The Young Ones, Blackadder and The Thin Blue Line.
More recently he has had successes with three hit West End musicals, including the global phenomenon We Will Rock You. He has written three plays for the London stage, including the multi-award-winning Popcorn. Ben's international bestselling novels include Stark, Inconceivable, Dead Famous and High Society. He won the Crime Writers' Association Gold Dagger Award for the novel Popcorn.
Elton lives in Perth with his Aussie wife Sophie and three children.
“You think I look like a teletubby?”
“No!" Jimmy protested.”
“The reactionary point of view was always so easy to put, the complex, radical argument always so easy to put down.”
“So far no one has claimed responsibility.”
“You're mugging old ladies every bit as much if you pinch their pension fund”
“People in that crowd want to make poverty history, but NOT if they have to pay for it themselves”
“New York will always seem more real than anything Britain has to offer. It is strange that, although the majority of British people have never seen a skate-boarding body-popper, an exploding fire-hydrant, or anybody dunk a doughnut, these things seem infinitely more immediate and happening images than that jar of Horlicks which has stood in the cupboard for 40 years”
“Books are the key. A book cannot be accessed from afar. You have to hold it, you have to read it.”
“Any closer would unravel her mystery, the very thing which made her so truly beautiful...It was her mystery that he adored. He was in love with everything that he did not know about her... No real sexual encounter could ever match the secret one that he could nurture in his imagination... No living flesh could ever be the erotic equal of flesh kept private, untouchable and unknowable”
“A society sufficiently sophisticated to produce the internal combustion engine has not had the sophistication to develop cheap and efficient public transport?'‘Yes, boss... it’s true. There’s hardly any buses, the trains are hopelessly underfunded, and hence the entire population is stuck in traffic”
“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?”
“You didn't wake up, your dreams just changed gear.”
“The worst thing about being a great power is when you're not one any more. It takes centuries to get over it.”
“To positively discriminate in favour of groups that have been negatively discriminated against in the past.”
“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.”
“[H]e was damned if he was going to water down his arguments simply to satisfy the preference of the mob for dogma and ignorance.”
“Artists don't create society, they reflect it”
“Beyond love, beyond unrequited love, perhaps even beyond any other passion known to humanity, deep, deep in the depths of the turgid, clinging, swamplike pit of despair that lies dormant within every soul, lurks JEALOUSY. Jealousy, that most demeaning and debilitating of emotions. Jealousy, which can double the strength of the love upon which it is based, but whilst doubling it, warp and pervert it, untill it is no longer recognizable as the thing of beauty it once was. Jealous love is no more like true love than Mr Hyde was like Dr Jekyll or a stagnant swamp is like a freshwater lake.”
“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.”
“This calls for a very special blend of psychology and extreme violence.”