Quotes About Television

There is a difference. You watch television, you don't witness it. But, while watching television, if you start witnessing yourself watching television, then there are two processes going on: you are watching television, and something within you is witnessing the process of watching television. Witnessing is deeper, far deeper. It is not equivalent to watching. Watching is superficial. So remember that meditation is witnessing.

When you watch television, you never see people watching television. We love television because it brings us a world in which television does not exist.

The days of television as we knew it growing up are over. You have a bigger, wider world audience on the Internet, larger than any American television series. People don't watch television in the same context as before. Nowadays they watch their television on the Internet at their convenience. That's the whole wave, and it's now - not the future.

Local television is a slightly different story. It is under much more pressure in the same way that all local businesses are, whether that's a local newspaper, local radio or local television. But I think television in the aggregate is actually in very good shape.

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.

I think television is moving more into movies, particularly with serialization and almost cinematic proportions and expectations. A show like 'Game of Thrones' is a perfect example of that, or even a show like 'The Wire,' which isn't all about instant gratification it's about inviting someone into the long experience of television the way you'd be invited into a theater for two hours. So I think in that way, and the quality of writing in television is probably much better than most film writing.

I grew up with television. I love television and to be working in it is awesome. I think where I do well at television is because I grew up watching the great sitcom actors Jackie Gleason, I love Rob Reiner, also John Ritter.

I think everything keeps changing. There was a time when television was a bad thing for actors and it meant that you could only do television, and now we see everyone does television.

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.

When I first started acting, I had all these ideals about the kinds of roles I wanted to play, but the reality is that when you do television - and I do a lot of television - you get cast for qualities that you have as a person. So I look for qualities that I like to portray.

Movies have gotten dull, the way network television got dull. And television, if we can still even call it that, is still really exciting and riveting and people are totally into it. I am always meeting people who have these favorite shows that they are completely wired too and not only have I never seen it but I don't even know how to find it.

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.

The great thing about adventure, when told correctly, is it is one of the few genres that everybody in the family can watch together. Our television has become so targeted, it's so specific that there's literally nothing else on television that grandparents are watching with their grandkids, and they're both entertained.

I guess probably in my time in politics, it continued to be affirmed to me that the African-American community, despite being subscription television's most valuable customers, they are very underserved by cable and satellite television programming options.

When reality television really hit, I just had a backlash towards reality. It seemed like a cheap way to make a product. And then when music reality and 'Idol hit,' I just didn't watch it, it seemed novelty. And of course the story of 'Idol,' this is one of the greatest stories in television history.

I certainly don't feel there's a distinction to be made between a television and a film actor. I think there's a distinction between great actors and not so great actors. But I really think if you watch a person working in television give a wonderful performance, that person is f - ing great, because there is no time.

If the picture is not an artistic picture, it's show, like television. Television series are very funny, but it's a collective production. An industrial art. A car is not made by a person, it's made by a group of creators, only to go to the market to buy your cigarettes. That is a car - they are not a big art, they are a little art.

That makes entertaining television. That is the circus of American Idol . We go for the very, very best and the very, very worst. It's the boring people that we don't want to see on television.

Are we on the tail-end of a generation that is enamored with the novelty of these devices and will younger people coming of age be more blasé about them in a healthy way? You look back at the history of any medium and the people who were there when it was developing, whether it was the telegraph or cable television or radio, thought, This is amazing, it's going change everything, or, The human community will finally be able to recognize each other and speak and be one - I mean, some people thought the telegraph or television would usher in world peace.

Democracy means free television, not good television, but free.

Television in America is so elaborate. There are so many remote cranes, and they have all the toys to play with. The directors are really good. They really work with you. So, I'm not really on set thinking, "Oh, my God, this is television. It's very different."

As an actor what you're always looking for is a character that is going to grow and change especially on television. I feel incredibly lucky to be working on a television show where the writing is always geared towards us growing and changing.

I am deeply honored that my team is being recognized by H.S.H. Prince Albert II and the Festival de Television de Monte-Carlo for Disney/ABC's role in creating television that inspires and captivates audiences wherever they live.

I love doing movies, but right now, television is the way Hollywood was in the late '60s and early '70s. The dream era I would have loved to have been part of in Hollywood then is happening right now, but it's happening on television, with these big complicated story arcs and real character-driven shows and sheer ambiguity left and right.

The worst thing about television is that everybody you see on television is doing something better than what you're doing. You never see anybody on TV just sliding off the front of the sofa, with potato chip crumbs all over their shirt.

We just have to go at 100 miles an hour in all our businesses, be they television broadcasting, be they magazine publishing, be they subscription television, be they online, be they gaming. We just have to go at one hundred miles an hour.

When you write comic books and when you are writing for television, you're not writing the end product, you are writing notes for someone else to make the end product essentially. My scripts are just directions for the artist to draw pages and the pages are what is seen. I kind of feel like it's a safety net, you're able to hide behind the art to a certain extent, and in television you're able to hide behind the actors and the production, but with novels, your words are it

I think that people might watch reality television or what they see played out on media outlets and get ideas. We might be more anesthetized to divorce or bad behavior now because of what we see on television or on postings on TMZ. So it definitely could be filtering in to how we conduct ourselves.

There are many things clogging the television waves. You've got to fight for every bit of television households you can get.

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.

It is naive to believe that a steady diet of blatant immorality, played out nightly in our living rooms, has no effect on people. I am always curious when individuals insist that what they watch on television or in movie theaters doesn't affect them. ... Are we really to believe that hours, leading to years, of television viewing will not affect attitudes about everything from family life to appropriate sexual relations?

When I started out, I was a television writer, and we wrote a television show that was on live every week. And you didn't have the luxury of coming in and waiting to be inspired. You came in and you had to write. And you wrote, because it was going to be live on the air. So I can do that.

As a child of the 1970s, I couldn't hold a narrative in my head; I was lucky if I could hold a joke in my head, because every time you turn on television or radio, it wipes the slate clean - at least in my case. After I gave up television, I found I could carry longer and longer stories or ideas in my head and put them together until I was carrying an entire short story. That's pretty much when I started writing.

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

Coming back into television, I was very, very wary about committing to anything that could potentially take a long time. I don't mind movies, but I was nervous of television.

The reality of television production now is that all the development money and pilot money now goes to the Internet so they can try to get pilots cheaper, than if they were producing them for television. I understand, it's a business, but what's great about doing it on the web, and one thing that attracted me is the amount of creative freedom that you do get with the web. That's the only advantage of there not being a lot of money involved, is that you're really able to write and do what you want... because there's not a lot of money involved and not money at risk.

I'd love to do another television series. I really love the writing process, and as an actor I really like how much you get to examine in television.

One of the great things about the old days of television, 10 years ago, or 15 years ago, was that it was water cooler television. People would communally watch the same hour. People used to tell us all the time, we turn off the phones, we put the kids to bed and that one hour is uninterrupted. Then, the next day at the water cooler, they all talk about it.

American movie audiences now just don’t seem to be very interested in any kind of ambiguity or any kind of real complexity of character or narrative - I’m talking in large numbers, there are always some, but enough to make hits out of movies that have those qualities. I think those qualities are now being seen on television and that people who want to see stories that have those kinds of qualities are watching television.

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 television business is actually going through a tremendous transition, but I think at the end of the day, television is still paramount.

When you listen to Christian radio stations - and there are thousands of them now in the United States - and when you listen to Christian television networks - and there are thousands of Christian television shows across the country - they are all politically right.

The Bush campaign for re-election has officially begun. They're actually running television commercials. Have you seen any of the television commercials? In one of the commercials, you see George Bush for thirty seconds. In another commercial, you get to see George Bush for sixty seconds - kind of like his stint in the National Guard.

Having a hearing is educational. Having a hearing with television cameras is useful. Having a hearing with two rows of television cameras is Heaven.

I love making movies, I love the differentness of it, I love writing. But I've always liked television. I grew up on television.

It's magical thinking to imagine that the reason unspeakable things are being perpetrated by younger and younger people is that they've fallen under the influence of seductive, lascivious, prurient, and violent material in books, films, television. A great deal of this type of censorship has to do with absolving parents of responsibility - parents who just plop their kids in front of the television and leave them there hour upon hour.

I don't believe terror and horror are just vicarious pleasures. I think it routes itself in your mind. It can affect your mind. Look at what's going on in the America today. The violence is just awful and I think a lot of has to do with what they are showing on the movies and television.

I love the stage. It's terrifying in a way that film and television is not. When you're about to go out, and you're adrenaline just gets out of control, and that can be really daunting.