Education Quote by David Selby

There’s a quiet flex buried in Selby’s modesty: he makes “learning lines” sound like picking up groceries, then lets the real tension slip in through the side door - television. The opening phrase, “delighted to have lines,” hints at the actor’s pecking order: in ensemble TV, especially in the era Selby came up in, you weren’t guaranteed focus, airtime, or even coherence in your character’s arc. Lines aren’t just words; they’re proof you matter in the cut.

He draws a clean distinction between mediums with working-actor pragmatism. Film, he implies, is controlled difficulty: you can shoot out of order, reset, do coverage, patch performance in the edit. Memorization is labor, but it’s predictable labor. Television, “a little different,” is industry understatement for relentless. When he says they “shot those shows the whole way through,” he’s pointing to a production rhythm closer to live performance than to cinema: longer continuous stretches, fewer breaks, less time to refine choices, and a pace that punishes hesitation. The subtext is anxiety managed through professionalism - the need to be ready not just for a scene, but for a sustained run.

The intent isn’t to romanticize either form; it’s to demystify craft. Selby frames acting as logistics plus stamina, not divine inspiration. That’s why it lands: it punctures the celebrity myth without bitterness, and it elevates TV not as “smaller” work, but as a different kind of pressure cooker where competence is the baseline and endurance becomes the artistry.