quotations about television
I consider the television set as the American fireplace, around which the whole family will gather.
RED SKELTON
attributed, A Companion to Television
Television is more interesting than people. If it were not, we would have people standing in the corners of our rooms.
ALAN COREN
attributed, A Companion to Television
Television is a daily menace to housework, and a nightly menace to homework.
EVAN ESAR
20,000 Quips & Quotes
I find television very educational. Every time someone switches it on I go into another room and read a good book.
GROUCHO MARX
attributed, Halliwell's Filmgoer's Companion
Before, my managers knew never to mention a TV series to me, because they knew how furious that would make me. I'd look at it like a vote of no confidence in my movie career, that I was going to be sent off to the television graveyard. But at a certain point I looked at the stuff I was consuming -- The Sopranos, The Wire -- and I realised the writers went to TV because they'd been screwed by the movies. It was still a difficult moment for me. I mean, my hand was shaking. Then they sent me three scripts, and they were three of the best scripts I'd seen in years. I was like, "Schmuck, you could've jumped on this years ago!"
KEVIN BACON
The Guardian, May 20, 2017
I haven't had a TV in 10 years, and I really don't miss it. 'Cause it's always so much more fun to be with people than it ever was to be with a television.
CHUCK PALAHNIUK
San Francisco Bay Guardian, October 30, 2002
When you're young, you look at television and think, There's a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that's not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want. That's a far more depressing thought.
STEVE JOBS
interview, WIRED Magazine, February 1996
They say that ninety percent of TV is junk. But ninety percent of everything is junk.
GENE RODDENBERRY
attributed, A Companion to Television
So, please, oh please, we beg, we pray, go throw your TV set away, and in its place you can install, a lovely bookcase on the wall.
ROALD DAHL
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
Can we find nothing good to say about TV? Well, yes, it brings scattered solitaries into a sort of communion. TV allows your isolated American to think that he participates in the life of the entire country. It does not actually place him in a community, but his heart is warmed with the suggestion (on the whole false) that there is a community somewhere in the vicinity and that his atomized consciousness will be drawn back toward the whole.
SAUL BELLOW
"The Distracted Public", It All Adds Up
Television is for appearing on, not looking at.
NOEL COWARD
The Letters of Noel Coward
Television is actually closer to reality than anything in books. The madness of TV is the madness of human life.
CAMILLE PAGLIA
attributed, A Companion to Television
People are definitely looking to television as a place they want to feel. They want to laugh, they want to cry, they want to enjoy. I think what the mood of the country has told us is that television is a little bit of an escape.
CHANNING DUNGEY
"Hit show 'Roseanne' is returning to television", WGN9, May 17, 2017
Peak TV is a perplexing time -- filled so often with wildly exciting premises and wildly unfulfilled promises.
MOZE HALPERIN
"This Week's Top 5 TV Picks", Flavorwire, June 12, 2017
In films, you're pampered as an actor. There are many breaks and you get to relax in between shots. The format of television is faster. After this stint, my respect for television actors has doubled. They have to be on the job all the while and at the same time deliver perfect takes as there is no luxury of retakes like in films.
CHI GURUDUTT
"Television is like playing a game of 20-20", The Times of India, June 5, 2017
One of the few good things about modern times: If you die horribly on television, you will not have died in vain. You will have entertained us.
KURT VONNEGUT
Cold Turkey
You're beginning to believe the illusions we're spinning here. You're beginning to believe that the tube is reality and your own lives are unreal. You do whatever the tube tells you: you dress like the tube, you eat like the tube, you raise your children like the tube, you even think like the tube! This is mass madness, you maniacs! In God's name, you people are the real thing, WE are the illusion!
PADDY CHAYEFSKY
Network
I used to think that television could be potentially the most powerful medium for the dissemination of knowledge that the world has ever known, it could be a very rich and rewarding thing if handled properly and that the problem was in the execution. I've now come, after ten years in the business, five years of which was as a television critic, to taking the very extreme view point. I think television itself is bad. The idea of television, the act of watching television kills the imagination. It's not like radio, with radio you had to listen, had to make things, you had to build things in your mind. Movies do that. Television is something else again. Television lays it all out there in a very prescribed way and the bare minimum of imagination on the part of the viewer is needed and I really fear for all of us.
HARLAN ELLISON
interview, 1979
Even the bad of television has its good: the worse the program is for children, the quieter it keeps them.
EVAN ESAR
20,000 Quips & Quotes
Over the past decade, there's been a continual debate about whether TV is, in one sense or another, "the new movies." This lively argument has drowned out another, more fascinating development: scripted television's raiding of literature for devices that it places in service of its own storytelling, then transforms into something that's part literature, part cinema, but ultimately and distinctively television.
MATT ZOLLER SEITZ
"Television's Best Shows Are Taking Their Cues From Literature", Vulture, May 17, 2017