Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
There's a lot of stuff I want to do, just things that I want to explore that don't involve show business. I'm going to become a television critic. Can you imagine? But I would even consider becoming a baseball scout. Traveling around the heartland looking for the next world-beating phenom.
Arguably, the first five years of 'Saturday Night Live' were some of the most radical things ever seen on television. When NBC said, 'Okay, you can do a show from 11:30 to 1 on Saturday night,' they didn't think anyone would watch. It was like giving a piece of the candy store to the kids.
I'm not a big believer in slavishly following research. It's one of the things that's wrong with television is that if you throw the whole - the decision-making process to the research department, you're not making any instinctive, visceral judgments about programs, which are show business.
Obviously sex and nudity sells, but that's what people go to cable for but that's not going to happen on network daytime television... so I think it really is always going to come down to story. How do you make a story interesting enough so people will tune in? That's always going to be it.
In Belgium, we know the U.S. culture through the television, but it's not the truth. It's interesting to see that Philadelphia is really industrial. I love industrial cities. Everybody hates them, but I think they're the best places to be creative. The more gritty it is, the more I love it.
In television, there's this weird sense of isolation from your audience; you kind of get this feeling that you write the show for you and your wife and your friends and the other people who work on the show. It's our little show, and then it goes out into the world, and somebody watches it.
I started out on the stage, then I had a great career in television for quite a few years. The good news about a TV series is that they give you a certain amount of fame and money. The bad news is that you're in people's living rooms every week and get associated with a particular character.
I learned my business in the theater and in television, particularly working with the actors. You can learn much more in the theater than directing a movie, because then you have no time when you are shooting a movie to really work with the actors. You have to learn this craft somewhere else.
In the U.S., the '50s and '60s marked the documentary's golden age, especially at CBS, where pioneering television journalist Edward R. Murrow, immortalised in George Clooney's 'Good Night, and Good Luck,' produced such landmark investigations as the CBS Reports programme 'Hunger in America.'
When I was in meditation, God began to speak to me, and God said, 'Roland, I have enough preachers. I need people where you are in your positions. When you are on radio, when you are on television, you speak into more people in the five minutes than some preachers speak to in an entire year.'
[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)
I was very depressed when I was 19... I would go back to my apartment every day and I would just sit there. It was quiet and it was lonely. It was still. It was just my piano and myself. I had a television and I would leave it on all the time just to feel like somebody was hanging out with me.
This is something I learned when I was working at a newspaper: when you put something on paper, whether it's words or pictures, and it's staring back at the reader, they are now alone in the room with them for as long as it takes them to turn the page. Whereas on television, the images fly by.
Ants are so much like human beings as to be an embarrassment. They farm fungi, raise aphids as livestock, launch armies into war, use chemical sprays to alarm and confuse enemies, capture slaves, engage in child labour, exchange information ceaselessly. They do everything but watch television.
I don't watch a lot of television. I try to watch all the good movies, but I've got about twenty of these television series that I should be watching. I haven't seen 'The Wire.' I haven't seen 'Mad Men.' I haven't seen Kevin's thing. What's that called? 'House of Cards.' I hear it's wonderful.
When you limit the length of the video to something under two minutes, it gives everyday people an opportunity to make something entertaining. It's harder to tell a story or create an entertaining piece of content that is based around the time slot model, television shows being 22 minutes long.
I don't want to succumb to the idea that for the generation, or generations, raised on television, the text is irrelevant or so intimidating that they won't deal with it. If you teach, you see this is not true. It may be that newer generations do not worship the text as some of their elders do.
I enjoy construction and the process of building things, so maybe I'd be a developer of some kind - residential and commercial. Because I produce a lot of television now, I enjoy building things from the ground up, whether it's a physical structure or a show, and seeing them and realizing them.
Hearing aids didn't cause any problem with my social life, my career, no problem at all, and I've been wearing them for a long time. As a matter of fact, once I became an entertainer and started working on television, I was probably the first performer to talk about hearing problems on the air.
'Psych' was so many different things, and they evolved in so many different ways over the years, and towards the end there, we were barely solving mysteries anymore. We were just paying homage to our favorite movies, television shows, and bringing through as many '80s icons as we possibly could.
It is great to add some glamour to the food industry, like television shows have done for the food world and inspiring people to work in the industry. The flip side of that is unfortunately people think that after they get their qualifications, they get their invitation to compete on 'Top Chef.'
The American television industry is a Darwinian environment where success is usually measured in inches, not yards. That is, for most TV media, audiences have gotten so small that one measures 'victories' in tenths of a point - as in, a 2.2 percent share is a great leap over a 2.1 percent share.
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.
In an age where there's so much active misinformation and its packaged very well and it looks the same when you see it on a Facebook page or you turn on your television. Where some overzealousness on the part of, you know, a U.S. official is equated with constant and severe repression elsewhere.
Back in the 1950s and '60s, J. M. Barrie's 'Peter Pan' - starring Mary Martin and Cyril Ritchard - was regularly aired on network television during the Christmas season. I must have seen it four or five times and remember, in particular, Ritchard's gloriously camp interpretation of Captain Hook.
The Internet is going to have a bigger impact on content creators than the television ever had. The reason why that's the case is that suddenly you're able to tell stories 24/7 in the home, out of the home, in every room of the home. A television screen can be in your pocket through a smartphone.
One of the basic troubles with radio and television news is that both instruments have grown up as an incompatible combination of show business, advertising and news. Each of the three is a rather bizarre and demanding profession. And when you get all three under one roof, the dust never settles.
I lost my innocence with Johnny Cash. I used to watch the 'Johnny Cash Show' on television in Wangaratta when I was about 9 or 10 years old. At that stage I had really no idea about rock n' roll. I watched him, and from that point I saw that music could be an evil thing - a beautiful, evil thing.
We need to let the referee's sole thing be to protect the quarterback and get those late hits out of there. They even have a stat on television that says 'knockdowns.' Knockdowns means that you knock him down after he throws the ball. The assumption is, if it's legal, we'll make excuses for them.
Catharsis isn't art. You can't rely on catharsis to get a laugh. Because guess what? People do laugh when something's shocking, but that is, to me, the absolute fakest of laughs. That's not something that sustains a television series, or a movie, or even 45 minutes of a stand-up set at Carolines.
I want to do everything. I just want variety and longevity. I've never filmed a movie before, I want to do that. I want to come back to theater at some point. But I was in New York for like ten years, grinding. I'm ready to be in L.A. for a little while, and really experience film and television.
Fame is a very unnatural human condition. When you stop to realize that Abraham Lincoln was probably never seen by more than 400 people in a single evening, and that I can enter over 40 million homes in a single evening due to the power of television, you have to admit the situation is not normal.
One week before my 17th birthday, I had a blind date with June Rose, a television actress on network soap operas, a model, and a regular on the popular Dick Clark's Saturday night 'American Bandstand' show from New York. We were married five years later, one week after my graduation from Columbia.
The book can't compete with the screen. It couldn't compete beginning with the movie screen. It couldn't compete with the television screen and it can't compete with the computer screen I don't think. And now we have all those screens so against all those screens I think the book can't measure up.
The reason we didn't acquire WCW is an incoming, rotating door, new head of Turner at that time, took prime time television literally out of the deal that we had already negotiated. Once that happened, there was no way to make any sense of it. It was really just a video library and some ring mats.
Whenever I write for television, I plan the story on whiteboard wallpaper in my office, using a system created by the American writer Dan Harmon. It's remarkably simple: a character wants something; they enter a new world and adapt to it; they get what they want, re-enter the old world and change.
For me, movies and television are interesting because they are the dominant storytelling form of our time. My first love will always be fiction, and especially novels, but I'm a writer... I write poetry and essays and criticism and I'd love to write a whole play, and sometimes I even write scripts.
For years, I've gone on television and made the case for the Second Amendment - the right to bear arms. I've pointed out that criminals don't follow gun laws, and I've defended the NRA and its members - law-abiding gun owners like me who have nothing to do with mass shootings or violent gun crimes.
A lot of people say television holds up a mirror to life, and that's why you see all the drug busts and the killings and the seamier side of life. I personally take the view that it's not sufficient to portray only negative role models. It's not enough to say 'no' to drugs. What do you say 'yes' to?
I was sitting in my office when someone called to tell me two light planes had collided with the World Trade Centre. I turned on my television; before long, there was this procession of people of all kinds walking up the street. What I remember most was the silence of that crowd; there was no sound.
I'm baffled when young actors aren't familiar with current film, television and theater, or aren't interested in older films or plays and the history of the craft in general. If you don't know what's out there, and what came before, then how can you picture yourself working, and how can anyone else?
It has taken a lot of persuasion for me to take part in an official documentary about 'Only Fools and Horses.' But, as time has gone on, it seems to have been imprinted in television history, and I thought it was only right that I tried to give an accurate insight into how the show was put together.
I made a lot of money. I earned a lot of money with CNN and satellite and cable television. And you can't really spend large sums of money, intelligently, on buying things. So I thought the best thing I could do was put some of that money back to work - making an investment in the future of humanity.
I would argue heavily that the time that has been allocated to social used to come from television, and people are benefitting from it. People who are saying, 'Aw, you're spending all your time on Facebook, or all your time on Twitter,' I'd like to understand what the person used to do with that time.
I once spent an entire night in a hotel in New York looking across the way into someone's apartment where nothing was happening but daily life, a phone call, television watching, staring into the fridge. Seeing how those strangers lived over that small distance and in absolute silence moved me deeply.
It's not an accident that both my sister and I are writers. Our parents created an accidental Petri dish. My family has great storytellers, and I grew up in a very funny, conversational house and didn't have television. This small family farm was a bubble world that didn't have much to do with reality.
I did 'Red Riding,' which is TV in the U.K. It became a feature project in North America, but we're in a great era of TV. We all know that, and we hear it all the time, but for filmmakers, it's just a godsend to have your television writing and work to do on television, and the means to do it properly.
I pretty quickly move from an idea to possibilities for execution. If there's one advantage, I think, with working in television for even a short amount of time is trying to gain a faculty for processing a storyline or an idea and how to then best implement that and execute that as swiftly as possible.
I consider myself lucky that Sheila Johnson, the cofounder of Black Entertainment Television, didn't choose to rest on her very impressive business laurels. Her luscious 100 percent modal scarves, printed with photos she takes all over the world, are gorgeous. Wearing one is like being wrapped in a hug.
When '36 Chowringhee Lane' was released in 1981, I was a student of the Film and Television Institute of Tamil Nadu. Everyone who had seen the film was very impressed with its flawless direction and acting. But we, cinematography students, were stunned by the visual style, which was truly international.