Quotes About Television

I don't want to sound creepy, but I remember when I couldn't really talk. I was looking at the television and my mother just moved one of the curtains, so the sun started to hit the television, and I couldn't see the television anymore. I started crying. I wasn't able to find the words to say, "I can't see this anymore, please do something about it." I remember crying and not knowing exactly how to express myself; not because it was painful, or that I was too upset, but because there were no words. As human beings, sometimes we just cry when we don't know how to say something.

I wouldn't be interested in [nowadays] television simply because I think it goes too fast. Except if something was maybe a play on television or some great television script.

Television thrives on unreason, and unreason thrives on television. It strikes at the emotions rather than the intellect.

Children from the age of five to ten should watch more television. Television depicts adults as rotten SOB's given to fistfights, gunplay, and other mayhem. Kids who believe this about grownups aren't likely to argue about bedtime.

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.

Television's getting better because people are investing more money and time and respect into it. But the secret weapon of television is that, because it's a slow burn, you get to meditate on things and develop them. As opposed to film, where you have an allotted amount of time and hopefully you can wrap it up in there.

There is some stuff on television that is shocking that it's on there, and shocking that it's not being censored. We run to that with torches and pitchforks and go after it. On Flavor Of Love, when a woman took a dump on the stairs, I mean, that's like J.R. being shot on Dallas, or like maybe the last episode of M*A*S*H. It's a milestone on television that's covered with chlamydia.

I saw him playing on television and was struck by his technique, so I asked my wife to come look at him. Now I never saw myself play, but I felt that this player is playing with a style similar to mine, and she looked at him on Television and said yes, there is a similarity between the two...his compactness, technique, stroke production - it all seemed to gel!

I grew up doing plays - I went to a stage school after school - and it's always something that I've wanted to do, but, in a weird way, if you do television and film and you didn't go to drama school and don't have a theatrical background, it's hard to get your foot in the door. In the same way that it is for theater actors to get into television and film. There's a weird prejudice that goes both ways.

I've always liked adventure television. Pre-'Survivor,' I did a series on cable called 'Eco-Challenge,' an adventure race with experts mainly, and here we have 'Expedition Impossible.' I like the outdoors and I like doing something fresh for television you haven't seen before.

Every day I turn on my television set and I see Newt Gingrich on television, I rejoice.

I think American television changed world television in its reinvention of the series.

Yeah, I like working in television, a lot. I really enjoyed my time on 'Lost.' I like developing that hint of family with people. I mean, if you're on a happy set. If you're on a set where there's some sour apples, then I don't like working in television.

I don't have a television, and I'm just not too up on television.

I'd say working on television is much, much tougher than films. But television has a great connect with a live audience, which is a refreshing change for us actors.

I don't really follow television so much, but in the old days there was a certain way TV was, and it wasn't really like cinema. I don't know how many ways it was different or the same, but it was not quite like cinema. Now, cinema can happen on television.

I'm one of those pathetic actors who will say yes to every play reading just because I do miss the stage so much. What I really miss about the theater is that in the end, it's yours to give. In television and film, it's yours to do and someone else's to take and someone else's to give. As much as I love television - the biggest luxury of all is to know that you have a job to go to - I do miss that connection and having that power over my own performance on stage.

There's so much good television now, and there's a lot of things on television that would have been a movie or maybe wouldn't have been made at all if it wasn't for cable and streaming. It's a really exciting part of the future and I really want to be a part of it.

If you want to use television to teach somebody, you must first teach them how to use television.

I love films, I love movies, I love television, I love television series, I love the internet, I love anything that enhances images. But most of all, I love, love movies.

Television watching should more properly be called television staring; it engages eye and ear simultaneously in a relentless and persistent way and leaves no room for daydreaming. This is what makes watching such an inferior form of leisure

I really enjoy doing films, but I also love television. I certainly would not be against doing some regular television work and being on a show that runs several years.

We have currently a built-in allergy to unpleasant or disturbing information. Our mass media reflect this. But unless we get up off our fat surpluses and recognize that television in the main is being used to distract, delude, amuse, and insulate us, then television and those who finance it, those who look at it, and those who work at it, may see a totally different picture too late.

I think it's become fashionable for the snobbish egghead today to make fun of television. I've heard many people, boast, "I would never have a television set in my house," well, these people are fools.

A lot of things that people think are risky, I don't think are risky. I don't get all that. I think what was really risky for network television was to let cable television to take the summers.

I had never thought of doing television. But my agent wanted me to meet John Wells, who had had a lot of success producing ER and China Beach. The night before the meeting, some friends were over for dinner and Akiva Goldsman and I slipped downstairs to the basement so we could sneak a cigarette. He said, "You know what would make a good television series? That." And he was pointing at The American President poster. He said, "There doesn't have to be a romance, just focus on a senior staffer."

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.

My job as a television anchor or television reporter is not to proselytize.

The more opportunities people have to experience television on different platforms, the more television they consume overall. So there actually has been a benefit, but the ratings have gone down. But we've seen kind of the horizontal benefit of this. And it remains a great, great promotion engine.

The internet has surrounded television and turned television into an art form.

What the British seem to like are television historians and naturalists, not public intellectuals. You can't help feeling that's because one supplies narrative and the other supplies facts, and the British are traditionally empiricists so they/we have a resistance to theory and to theoreticians playing too prominent a role in public life.

Working in theater, film or television are three different jobs for an actor, and I accept them as such.

Because when you watch US television, all the presenters and reporters, they're all out of central casting.

I think that comes with a collaboration with the writers. I think that we get cast in edgier roles because we are a little more offbeat, so people - as we get to know the writers, and as the writers get to know us, they start to write around us more, and that's why I think the pilot is not always the best way to get to experience a new television show, because we're fitting ourselves into these characters. Whereas as the show evolves, they're writing the characters for us and for our strengths and weaknesses.

We've been able to watch on our television screens sophisticated weaponry find a building; and we've seen dramatic reports from the front where Pulitzer Prize-to-be winning reporters stood up and declared, the United States is attacked, and all that.

Well, I had an immense respect for Cirque du Soleil when I first say them in the '80s on a television show and just thought, you know, this group is really reinventing the circus, as you know. Because there wasn't three rings. There were no animals.

We wanted to prove that I am not just a provocateur, as the television said [referring to a Fox news clip shown in the film]. It's challenging, but it's not just challenging.

They killed me in The Sopranos. I went to David Chase, and I said, "Why me? I'm a detective! You can use me forever!" And he told me, "John, there's a rule in television: Somebody has to die that the audience likes."

People have been predicting the death of television for 20 years now, and so far it's been entirely wrong. But it does seem viewership habits are starting to change.

It's very hard to become an actor in film and television, you have to have such perseverance and you have to really believe that if you have any sort of talent at all, you will find work one day.

Films allow you more preparation time, keeping the higher budgets in mind. Television makes you work really fast, but maintain certain standards. Then it's up to me to seek out the best of both worlds.

A lot of the comedians nowadays just do comedy as a stepping stone. Take for example Dane Cook. The guy is huge. The main reason he got into it is to do what he is doing now: film and television work.

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.

Be very careful of what you allow to infiltrate your consciousness and subconsciousness. When you watch too much television, you'll start to feel inferior from all the commercials hard selling the idea that you're not complete unless you buy their product. The ad agencies appeal to your fear of not being wanted or loved. It's the same with the local news. They get you to stay tuned with a constant stream of fear tactics. It's as if our culture is addicted to fear and the flat screen is our drug dealer. Don't allow that crap into your head!

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.

She grew up hard and she grew up fast, in the age of television.

We really didn't have the option of being couch potatoes when I was growing up. There were only three television channels and the only kid's programming was on Saturday morning. We always played outside until we could hear Mom calling us (not by cell phone but with her hands cupped around her mouth) that it was dinner time.

I watch so much television. My DVR is full. I love putting my kids to bed, so I can sit on the couch with my wife and we can dissect The Affair, The Americans, House of Cards, or whatever it is. I'm so lucky.