Quotes About Television

The tough decisions that a president has to make in the Oval Office are in no way related to the capability of a person to do well on television. On the other hand, the capability of a person to project favorably on television enhances that person's odds of being elected so he can serve in the Oval Office. So you can't ignore the talents, one, to be very effective on television, and on the other hand, to be very effective as an operating president.

For one year, I want to do this thing where I guest-star on as many television shows as I possibly can. I love television. The fact that television ultimately made me famous was very gratifying for me.

You can't really gauge the difficulties of television. There's difficulties and joys that happen with an amazing, great team, when one is working. Television can be a very frustrating job for almost anybody working in television, because you're shooting episodically, and you don't know one scene from the next, and maybe they change around.

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.

When television came roaring in after the war (World War II) they did a little school survey asking children which they preferred and why - television or radio. And there was this 7-year-old boy who said he preferred radio "because the pictures were better.

All television is children's television.

Often times people complain about the lack of time in television, but I have to say, you don't have any more time to film in feature films then you do in television. It's just a question of how many scenes you'll be doing in the course of a day.

Television is a non graded curriculum and excludes no viewer for any reason, at any time. In other words, in doing away wtih the idea of sequenece and continuity in education, television undermines the idea that sequence and continuity have anything to do with thought itself.

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.

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.

I think where Playground is heading is deeper into that marriage between stage, film and television, with the increasing number of people in the film business working in television, obviously something that we were very influential in starting and doing at HBO. And I think that that's the focus of where I see the company moving forward, continuing to explore that intersection of all that talent.

Television is in a different time because of reality television, so it's not as exciting.

Most of the time people are aiming so low on television. They're trying to reach that common denominator, especially on network television.

[It] is not that television is entertaining but that it has made entertainment itself the natural format for the representation of all experience. […] The problem is not that television presents us with entertaining subject matter but that all subject matter is presented as entertaining. (87)

People are very surprised to hear me say that a lot of my values are Christian values. I think that's part of my shock. I just don't like the way that Christianity combined with the influence of television has bred a nation of weakness. (Christian television do get the facts wrong sometimes and the image they portray turns most people off.)

I got into television criticism because I thought it would be easier than film criticism. Film, you had to know 100 years of history, and TV you only had to know 40 when I started. And I thought, "Well, that's going to be so much easier." But film stayed pretty much the same. And television has changed so many times that my head hurts. So I made the wrong call there.

Good television people have a sense of what television people relate to.

I find with television, you have to play personality, whereas onstage, everyone talks about "the character," and what you do. It's a very different thing, because stage is much bigger, but on television, for things to come across to the public, I think you have to play a bit of your personality.

I hate going to L.A. and dealing with the contempt people have for television and television actors. Its unbelievable the kind of attitude people take toward what is the most exciting medium weve got right now.

I think television is doing a better job than films in terms of representing people, but television is still not diverse.

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.

Everybody's slow right now, there's nothing happening musically, everybody's all on cable television and being manipulated by all the television right now, what's on cable telling people what to listen to and stuff.

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

All television is educational television. The question is: what is it teaching?

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 was interested in opera and it seemed to me that the only possible theatre for contemporary opera would be television. So I started working towards a kind of television kind of opera.

Most Chinese filmmakers grew up watching television; they watched films on television, not in cinemas. The scope of their vision is not big enough, they're not yet detail-oriented enough. You have to watch films in cinemas for years to understand the depth and scope of vision needed in filmmaking. Directors in China usually come from an academic background; they graduate as film directors. Whereas the directors from Hong Kong learn their trade on sets, beginning at the lowest rung.

Postman is a media analyst and his theory is that television doesn't influence our culture, but that it is our culture and the presidency and anything that relies on television.

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

My father did think I should get interested in television. But I had very little interest in television and it wasn't something I wanted to do. I really never thought about going to work on big feature films in Hollywood. But when we made The Householder, Columbia Pictures bought it. Who would have ever imagined?

If your working television sits on top of your non-working television, you might be a redneck.

Once in a while a good opportunity would come along, like the first 'Playhouse 90 ever to air - working in television afforded me my best opportunities. The (film) industry was going through such turmoil at the time - studios didn't know where to go anymore, they were falling apart, television was there. They didn't know what kind of films people wanted. The European films were making a huge impact because those films wanted real people in real situations.

There were no competitions on television. The first skating competition I ever remember seeing on television was the 1968 Olympics when Peggy Fleming won.

TV can be an acronym for television or transvestite. I prefer using it to describe the the latter. The former is strange and undignified.

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.

One of the great sadnesses of modern life, because of our disenfranchisement and disillusionment with religion, is that we don't have access to these ideas. Yoga and meditation, for me, is a way of, in this secular world, accessing very very beautiful principles that would perhaps make us happier, at a time when people feel disillusioned with the economy, concerned about the ecology, worried with politicians, and don't trust what they're being told on television.

Make Earth Day Every Day.” While we might not always live up to this ideal, I try to keep this quote from Denis Hayes, founder of the Earth Day Network and president of Seattle’s Bullitt Foundation, in mind when I need a little extra motivation to be a better environmentalist: “Listen up, you couch potatoes: each recycled beer can saves enough electricity to run a television for three hours.

I learned how to speak English watching television.

I mean, there's definitely a difference between film and live performances or live television. But at the same time, it's just performing. No matter what, it's performing.

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

A lot of TV is put together by teams, by writing staffs and several different directors. It's a great, very smart way to make television. It's worked for however long TV's been around.

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.

In primetime cable television today, the anchor or anchors, with an "s", have to drive the hour. The anchor has to be skilled enough to take it over. So if I find that it's getting boring or I'm not getting information I want, I'll take it over. I'll do a soliloquy, I'll ask an outrageous question, I'll wave my arms in the air, I'll lift it myself. It's like a quarterback that's back to pass and nobody's open.

If you feel so strongly about what's on television, don't have one.

Dreams are more original than images we see in the media, and are surprisingly unaffected by media. For example, the average person watches several hours of television per day, yet dreams are rarely about shows we have watched or news of the day.

Television hangs on the questionable theory that whatever happens anywhere should be sensed everywhere. If everyone is going to be able to see everything, in the long run all sights may lose whatever rarity value they once possessed, and it may well turn out that people, being able to see and hear practically everything, will be specially interested in almost nothing.

For my job, I act tough. I'm not tough. On the street, I don't go out beating people up and this and that. I used to joke one time on the television station that I never... Everybody that I beat up deserved it. I never beat up an innocent person.

My mother always told me that any talent is a gift of God and I always believed it. If I quit, I would just live in front of the television and get fat and die pretty soon.