Steven Moffat Quotes

“People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but *actually* from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint - it's more like a big ball of wibbly wobbly ... time-y wimey ... stuff.”

— Steven Moffat

Amy Pond: 'I thought ... well, I started to think you were just a madman with a box.'
The Doctor: 'Amy Pond, there's something you better understand about me, 'cause it's important and one day your life may depend on it. [He Smiles] I am definitely a madman with a box.

— Steven Moffat

“The Doctor: This is bad, I don't like this. [kicks console and yells in pain] Never use force, you just embarrass yourself. Unless you're cross, in which case ... always use force!
Amy: Shall I run and get the manual?
The Doctor: I threw it in a supernova.
Amy: You threw the manual in a supernova? Why?
The Doctor: Because I disagreed with it! Now stop talking to me when I'm cross!”

— Steven Moffat

“I'll be a story in your head. That's okay. We're all stories in the end. Just make it a good one, eh? 'Cause it was, you know. It was the best. The daft old man who stole a magic box and ran away. Did I ever tell you that I stole it? Well I borrowed it. I was always going to take it back.”

— Steven Moffat

The Doctor: [aiming gun at the ceiling] Didn't anyone ever tell you? There's one thing you never put in a trap if you're smart. If you value your continued existence, if you have any plans about seeing tomorrow, there's one thing you never, ever put in a trap.
Angel Bob: And what would that be, sir?
The Doctor: Me. [fires]

— Steven Moffat

“You should always waste time when you don't have any. Time is not the boss of you. Rule 408.”

— Steven Moffat

“Rose: Look at you, beaming away like you're Father Christmas!
The Doctor: Who says I'm not, red-bicycle-when-you-were-twelve?
Rose: [shocked] What?
The Doctor: And everybody lives, Rose! Everybody lives! I need more days like this! Go on, ask me anything; I'm on fire!”

— Steven Moffat

Fascinatingly confident, rude people are great.

— Steven Moffat

“I can't see what's wrong about assuming intelligence in your audience and what's bad news about being rewarded for assuming that.”

— Steven Moffat

“I was called a misogynist because I was reducing women to mothers. 'Reducing women to mothers' - now there is possibly the most anti-women statement I've heard.”

— Steven Moffat

I know this is going to sound very self-serving, and I apologize for it, but if you can write comedy, you can pretty much write anything, because it's the hardest. It's the most technically demanding, the most precisely evaluated form of writing. People know if it works or not. There's a big button marked 'fail,' and that's when nobody laughs.

— Steven Moffat

“The difference between a beautifully made failure and a beautifully made hit is who you've got playing the leads.”

— Steven Moffat

“I think of myself as a writer with a sense of humour rather than a comedy writer. Happy to tell a story with lots of jokes in it - I wouldn't know how to do jokes without the story.”

— Steven Moffat

“Cinema is so slow and boring compared to television.”

— Steven Moffat

“I hope I won't become hated by geeks everywhere, but I don't really know comic books all that well.”

— Steven Moffat

“My problem is that the audience is more fiction-literate than ever. In Shakespeare's day, you probably expected to see a play once or twice in your life; today you experience four or five different kinds of fiction every day. So staying ahead of the audience is impossible.”

— Steven Moffat

“River Song: Right then. I have questions, but number one is this - what in the name of sanity have you got on your head?
The Doctor: It's a fez. I wear a fez now. Fezzes are cool.”

— Steven Moffat

“Though the man above might say hello, expect no love from the beast below”

— Steven Moffat

“It's a TV show. Only the emotional damage is real.”

— Steven Moffat

If it's time to go, remember what you're leaving. Remember the best.

— Steven Moffat

“Amy: I had something I wanted to tell him. Stuff always gets in the way.
Canton: Stuff does that.”

— Steven Moffat

“Young Reinette: Monsieur, be careful!
The Doctor: It's just a nightmare, Reinette, don't worry, everyone has nightmares. Even monsters under the bed have nightmares!
Young Reinette: What do monsters have nightmares about?
The Doctor: Me!”

— Steven Moffat

“This was supposed to be yesterday. I was sitting on the Cardiff/London train, supposedly about to write this very column, and realising something quite terrible. My head was entirely empty. A vast echoing void. Bigger on the inside, but with nothing in it. You could drop a pebble in my brain and wait for an hour to hear it land. No actually, you couldn't - that would be aggressive and unhelpful, so keep your damn pebbles to yourself.”

— Steven Moffat

“I don't know. I can't tell the future I just work there.”

— Steven Moffat

It's hard to talk about the importance of an imaginary hero. But heroes ARE important: Heroes tell us something about ourselves.
History tells us who we used to be, documentaries tell us who we are now; but heroes tell us who we WANT to be.
And a lot of our heroes depress me.
But when they made this particular hero, they didn't give him a gun
they gave him a screwdriver to fix things. They didn't give him a tank or a warship or an x-wing fighter
they gave him a box from which you can call for help. And they didn't give him a superpower or pointy ears or a heat-ray
they gave him an extra HEART. They gave him two hearts! And that's an extraordinary thing.
There will never come a time when we don't need a hero like the Doctor.

— Steven Moffat

Have you met the French? My ... GOD they know how to party!

— Steven Moffat

“Think you've seen it all? Think again. Outside those doors, we might see anything. We could find new worlds, terrifying monsters, impossible things. And if you come with me ... nothing will ever be the same again!”

— Steven Moffat

I think that's the way people absorb television. All the explanations in Doctor Who are there if that's your bag, but they're not essential to your enjoyment of it. An awful lot of storytelling isn't really about making people understand - it's about making people care.

— Steven Moffat

The Doctor: I've seen bigger.
Clara: Really?
The Doctor: Are you joking? It's massive!

— Steven Moffat

You're guaranteed to be lucky several times in your life-it's what you do with it. Young writers spend all their time worrying, in a way that David Gerrold did not and I did not. How do they get to meet the right people? How do they get to the right parties? If only someone would read my script ... Forget all that. All these things are easy and will happen. The way you get your script to the right people is that you put it in an envelope. It's fucking easy. The difficult bit is writing something that is so good people will take a punt on a brand new writer. That's it-you have to write an absolutely terrific script.

— Steven Moffat

You don't just give up. You don't just let things happen. You make a stand! You say no! You have the guts to do what's right, even when everyone else just runs away.

— Steven Moffat

Let me tell you about scared. Your heart is beating so hard I can feel it through your hands. There's so much blood and oxygen pumping through your brain it's like rocket fuel. Right now you could run faster and you can fight harder. You can jump higher than ever in your life and you are so alert it's like you can slow down time.
What's wrong with scared? Scared is a superpower! Your superpower! There is danger in this room. And guess what? It's you. Do you feel it? Do you think he feels it? Do you think he's scared? Nah. Loser!

— Steven Moffat

“In bed above, we're deep asleep.
While greater love lies further deep.
This dream must end,
The world must know,
We all depend on the beat below.”

— Steven Moffat

“Amy: Up.
Rory: What good's up?
Amy: Better than down.
-Doctor Who”

— Steven Moffat

“Mycroft Holmes: ... a necessary evil, not a dragon for you to slay.
Sherlock Holmes: A dragon slayer? Is that what you think of me?
Mycroft: No ... It's what you think of yourself.
Mrs. Holmes/Mum: Are you two smoking?
Mycroft: No-
Sherlock: It was Mycroft!
(They hide their lighted cigarettes behind their backs.) -Sherlock, "His Last Vow", season/series 3”

— Steven Moffat

“Maybe I'm in Hell. That's okay, I'm not scared of Hell - it's just Heaven for bad people.”

— Steven Moffat

“There are two events in everybody's life that nobody remembers. Two moments experienced by every living thing. Yet no one remembers anything about them. Nobody remembers being born and nobody remembers dying. Is that why we always stare into the eye sockets of a skull? Because we're asking, "What was it like?" "Does it hurt?" "Are you still scared?".”

— Steven Moffat

“The eyes are not the windows but the doors of the soul. Beware what may enter them.”

— Steven Moffat

“The Doctor: You betrayed me. You betrayed my trust, you betrayed our friendship, you betrayed everything I ever stood for. You let me down!
Clara: Then why are you helping me?
The Doctor: Why? Do you think I care for you so little that betraying me would make a difference?”

— Steven Moffat

“If you take most men aside when their wives are pregnant, most men are pretty frightened and worried and faintly disgusted by the whole experience.”

— Steven Moffat

“My priorities are where they should be, which is making really great, really exciting television.”

— Steven Moffat

“I like naked women. I'm a bloke. I'm supposed to like them. We're born like that. We like naked women as soon as we're pulled out of one ... When man invented fire, he didn't say, "Hey, let's cook." He said, "Great, now we can see naked bottoms in the dark" ... The story of male achievement through the ages, feeble though it may have been, has been the story of our struggle to get a better look at your bottoms.”

— Steven Moffat

“We're thrilled to have Maisie Williams joining us on Doctor Who. It's not possible to say too much about who or what she's playing, but she is going to challenge the Doctor in very unexpected ways. This time he might just be out of his depth, and we know Maisie is going to give him exactly the right sort of hell.”

— Steven Moffat

“Keep this straight in your head: we are not fighting an alien invasion we're leading a revolution . And today the battle begins.”

— Steven Moffat

Witty and mean is easy - but fond and funny is hard.

— Steven Moffat

“Sarah Jane Smith was everybody's hero when I was younger, and as brave and funny and brilliant as people only ever are in stories. But many years later, when I met the real Sarah Jane - Lis Sladen herself - she was exactly as any child ever have wanted her to be. Kind and gentle and clever; and a ferociously talented actress, of course, but in that perfectly English unassuming way.”

— Steven Moffat

As we all know, it is the proper duty of every British subject to come to the aid of the TARDIS.

— Steven Moffat

“When man invented fire, he didn't say, "Hey, let's cook." He said, "Great, now we can see naked bottoms in the dark.”

— Steven Moffat

“It's been a long time since Sherlock Holmes jumped off that roof - it's time to reveal the truth about what happened between him and the pavement.”

— Steven Moffat

“Between the marriages, I shagged my way round television studios like a mechanical digger.”

— Steven Moffat