Quotes About Television

I've got a lot to say about television. There's a lot going on in television right now and I feel like a huge part of television.

Television isn't inherently good or bad. You go to a bookstore, there are how many thousands of books, but how many of those do you want? Five? Television's the same way. If you're going to show people stuff, television is the way to go. Words and pictures show things.

Television is the same as the telephone, and the same as the World Wide Web for that matter. People who become obsessed by the peculiarities of these communications media have simply failed to adjust to the shock of the old. People who bleat on about the 'artistic' potential of television qua television are equally deluded.

This whole thing about reality television to me is really indicative of America saying we're not satisfied just watching television, we want to star in our own TV shows. We want you to discover us and put us in your own TV show, and we want television to be about us, finally.

I think I entered the market around the time when there was getting to be less snobbery about the difference between feature films and television. I think there's been a lot more receptivity on television to interesting adult stories that in the '60s and '70s would have been made into feature films. I have no problem jumping back and forth. If anything, I find it less restrictive working in television.

Such techniques, including meta-discursive stuff, self-reference, irony, black humor, cynicism, grotesquerie and shock, it would be safe to say that television or televisual values rule the culture. Television is successfully using a lot of those same techniques but using them for a very different agenda, which is to sort of create an ethos and please people and to sell products to consumers.

I'm married now, so I have a life. I had to get a life. That's one thing I really had to do, you know. You do that kind of work on television series after television series and you don't have a life. So, that's part of what I did while I was gone, I got a life.

I think television scripts have become really intriguing and well-done. And writers have stopped drawing any actual line between film and television they used to never cross.

I grew up in a house full of music, and a house that didn't have a television. We had a piano, but no television. And really, I very quickly realized that this was, you know, there was magic there, there was magic to be had, you could lose yourself in it, it was a refuge, it was joy, it was all of those things.

Rather than lose the public because television is here, wouldn't it be smart to adopt television as our instrument?

Jeff always says, "In the cinema, everybody goes to sci-fi. Those are the biggest movies. But, in television, nobody wants to touch it with a barge pole." It's strange. I think it's because maybe there's a legacy of television shows that depicted sci-fi in a certain way that turns off a lot of viewers, so maybe there's a negative connotation.

Daytime television, you can tell who’s watching by the three kinds of commercials. Either it’s clinics for drying out drunks. Or it’s law firms who want to settle injury suits. Or it’s schools offering mail-order vocational degrees to make you a bookkeeper. A private detective. Or a locksmith. If you’re watching daytime television, this is your new demographic. You’re a drunk. Or a cripple. Or an idiot.

Television is a constant stream of fact, opinions, lies, moral dilemmas, plots: an infinitely complex and sophisticated torrent of information. How could it not make you cleverer? The only people who ever thought television rotted the brain and made kids dumb were those with a vested interest in other ways of learning, or those who were intellectually insecure, usually about books.

I think it's a great time to be a person of color and with talent. And actually, to be a woman as well. Our show is one of the most diverse television shows on television right now.

Another possible source of guidance for teenagers is television, but television's message has always been that the need for truth, wisdom and world peace pales by comparison with the need for a toothpaste that offers whiter teeth *and* fresher breath.

Hopefully I'll fit the television in there. Maybe it'll be like music and television and movies. I mean, who knows? But hopefully I can be successful at everything I do.

I think I've actually benefited from Australia being a kind of combination of both British and American culture. We kind of got the best of both British and American television and books, science fiction and fantasy, and so on. So I'm familiar with a lot of, for example, American books and television that a British author of my generation might not be.

I should watch network television, or daytime television, because I'm not sure who all these people are who keep getting referred to in blogs and newspapers. I better get myself culturally attuned.

So there was a constant flow and a thin line there between reality and television and yes, much of what I was experiencing in my real life was also what was going on in the television show to the extent that I had to take writers advice and from the counselors around.

Disparagement of television is second only to watching television as an American pastime.

When I sit down, I find that it's much easier for me to want to consume a movie than to dip back into 20 or 40 or 60 hours of a television series. I think a great movie is really amazing. But, television does give you a larger canvas.

Sometimes when you have an abundance of time and money, it's less conducive to the creative process. I like the urgency of the television schedule and the television price point. It's fluid. You figure it out on the day, and I love the challenge of problem-solving.

Trust me, the being-dead part is much easier than the dying part. If you can watch much television, then being dead will be a cinch. Actually, watching television and surfing the Internet are really excellent practice for being dead.

The closest I came to doing anything that I wanted to do was to try and check and see what industries were just starting out. There was plastics and television, and I figured television had to be more fun than plastics.

What little reality television I've seen seems to be about economic desperation. Like the marathon dancing of the Great Depression, which should give us pause. People willing to eat flies and worms for a sum that is less than the weekly paycheck of the show's producer. I haven't seen "reality television" that is other than this kind of painful, sadistic exploitation of fit young people looking for agents.

The U.S. is telling the Northern Alliance to kill Taliban prisoners. It's totally a breach of all the known conventions of war. Western television networks aren't showing this, but Arab networks are showing how prisoners are being killed and what's being done to them. Instead, we're shown scenes that are deliberately created for the Western media: a few women without the veil, a woman reading the news on Kabul television, and 150 people cheering.

The American house has been TV-centered for three generations. It is the focus of family life, and the life of the house correspondingly turns inward, away from whatever corresponds beyond its four walls.At the same time, the television is the families chief connection to the world. The physical envelope of the house itself no longer connects their lives to the outside in any active way; rather it seals them from it.The outside world has become an abstraction filtered through television, just as the weather is an abstraction filtered through air conditioning.

Nowadays, to be frank, every week is a good week for freakshow television. we might start asking, Why are there so many freaks? And why do they all want to be on television?

Television was not intended to make human beings vacuous, but it is an emanation of their vacuity.

Choosing how you vote should not be a snap verdict based on a few minutes of television.

The hope for me going back into television - after doing what will have been two years of radio - is to bring that authenticity with me. And, to not have the visual be overpowering the content.

I think one of the problems in determining the ending for a television series is that you don't know how long the show is gonna last. Particularly because we were in the unique position of adapting Tom's Perrotta novel The Leftovers, it always felt like the first season was gonna end with the end of Tom's novel, and then we would figure things out from there and look back.

The fans always ask me, 'Is Si that crazy in real life?' and I said, 'No, hey, he tones it down for television.'

Only at the Golden Globes do the beautiful people of film rub shoulders with the rat-faced people in television.

My dad is a successful television producer, director and writer and my mom's a director and writer.

You can't have Rosie on The View and Elton John packing Mom and Pop in at Caesars Palace and gay people all over television, and then have these politicians run out there with a straight face and say that gay and lesbian relationships are a threat to the family. We are winning in the culture - which is why we'll ultimately win the political war.

Remember what Hannah Arendt said when she was talking about fascism and totalitarianism. She said thoughtlessness is the essence of totalitarianism. So all of a sudden emotion becomes more important than reason. Ignorance becomes more important than justice. Injustice is looked over as simply something that happens on television. The spectacle of violence takes over everything.

Television is coitus interruptus brought into aesthetics.

The nuclear generator of brain sludge is television.

When I first started out on the soap, I was more theatrical, like a stage actor, a little bigger than life. As I did more and more Love Of Life, I became more natural. I learned the value of underplaying. It was a great training ground for me. There was a big difference in my style of acting from where I started with that show and where I ended, and where I ended was a good jumping-off point for doing nighttime television and movies.

In television, I don't feel constraints. I feel a lot freedom to maneuver.

Theatre, film and television are all modes of storytelling, and many of us are fortunate enough to move freely among them without feeling that we've 'left' or need to 'go back' to one or the other. In fact, if the theatre is to avoid a brain drain, this kind of fluidity is increasingly necessary.

In this day and age, especially with all the media and television, social media, and the Internet, we are constantly being compared and comparing ourselves to others' lives and journeys. Keep your eyes on your own road.

If you want good sketches, go pick up Sid Caesar. The best of Your Show of Shows. That's the greatest sketch comedy you'll ever see on television.

The only way I'd want to do something in television would be if it was about how I think as a comedian. I'd need to be able to be a creator. That's what I enjoy - I enjoy coming up with comedy, so it'd be very difficult for me to be sitting in a room and have somebody come in and say, "Here's your script! Learn these lines!" That's not fun. At least not for me.

A television advertisement must illustrate the scientific method to substantiate any claim.... That is why stains are lifted, ring-around-the-collar is removed, paper towels become soaked, excess stomach acid is absorbed, and headaches go away-all during the commercial.

By exercise. I'll tell you one thing, you don't always have to be on the go. I sit around a lot, I read a lot, and I do watch television. But I also work out for two hours every day of my life, even when I'm on the road.

I've worked in television long enough to know that when you stop enjoying that type of thing you go home and do something else.