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

Ben Elton

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

First Little People
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.
BEN ELTON

Night Past
You didn’t wake up, your dreams just changed gear.
BEN ELTON

Dream Gears Wake Up
The Germans are a cruel race. Their operas last for six hours and they have no word for fluffy.
BEN ELTON

Lasts Opera Race
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.
BEN ELTON

Hot Police Writing
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.
BEN ELTON

Natural People Waiting
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.
BEN ELTON

Believe Groups Looks
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.
BEN ELTON

Beens Comedy Instinct
I see dull people as projects … to be reformed
BEN ELTON

Dull People Project
The worst thing about being a great power is when you’re not one any more. It takes centuries to get over it.
BEN ELTON

Century Over Worst
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!
BEN ELTON

Advice Looks Novel
My parents were secular. I am an atheist.
BEN ELTON

Atheist Parent Secular
Sympathy for victims is always counter-balanced by an equal and opposite feeling of resentment towards them.
BEN ELTON

Feelings Opposite Sympathy
I exercise hard and the reason I do is so that I can earn the things I like to consume.
BEN ELTON

Exercise Hard Reason
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.
BEN ELTON

Doe Real World
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.
BEN ELTON

Baseball Oasis Vote
I don’t consider myself Jewish. I am half-Jewish by race but not through my mother.
BEN ELTON

Half Mother Race
This calls for a very special blend of psychology and extreme violence.
BEN ELTON

Psychology Special Violence
You’re mugging old ladies every bit as much if you pinch their pension fund
BEN ELTON

Fund Lady Old Pension
I don’t know what people who I’ve never met think about me. Some have written horrible things, some have written nice things – but I’m proud of the fact I’ve remained close to everyone I’ve ever worked with.
BEN ELTON

Nice People Thinking
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.
BEN ELTON

Book Key Lecture Paper Read
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.
BEN ELTON

Jealous Love Lying Unrequited
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.
BEN ELTON

Love Memorable People
You think I look like a teletubby?
BEN ELTON

Looks Thinking
Leaders should never, ever try to look cool – that’s for dictators
BEN ELTON

Leader Looks Trying
And roast beef and Yorkshire pudding is my personal signature dish.
BEN ELTON

Beef Pudding Signature
I think it is very difficult to legislate for morality.
BEN ELTON

Difficult Morality Thinking

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

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

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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