Television Quotes

"Before I was shot, I always thought that I was more half-there than all-there - I always suspected that I was watching TV instead of living life. Right when I was being shot and ever since, I knew that I was watching television"

Andy Warhol, Artist

"I don't want to promote my own image either. I don't like going on television or mixing in literary circles"

Antonio Tabucchi, Writer

"I was very sad to hear of the death of Ronnie Barker, who was such a warm, friendly and encouraging presence to have when I started in television. He was also a great comic actor to learn from"

John Cleese, Actor

"We didn't have television until I was about eight years old, so it was either the movies or radio. A lot of radio drama. That was our television, you know. We had to use our imagination. So it was really those two things, and the comics, that I immersed myself in as a child"

Jessica Hagedorn, Playwright

"But I never, never thought of the ministry nor did - of course, television when I was growing up, there was no television. So I didn't know anything about it"

Pat Robertson, Clergyman

"I'm sure 50 percent of television ads use rhyme"

Paul Muldoon, Poet

"I write for a certain sphere of readers in the United States who on average watch seven and a half hours of multichannel television per day"

Jerzy Kosinski, Novelist

"We don't care really about children as a society and television reflects that indifference to children as human beings"

Bill Moyers, Journalist

"If everyone demanded peace instead of another television set, then there'd be peace"

John Lennon, Musician

"My father was invited to play on a television show when I was 17 or 18 that was an early equivalent of educational television, a Sunday afternoon kind of variety art show"

John Sebastian, Musician

"Women didn't want to watch other women on television because they were jealous of their husbands' diverted attention"

Jessica Savitch, Journalist

"What's really important in life? Sitting on a beach? Looking at television eight hours a day? I think we have to appreciate that we're alive for only a limited period of time, and we'll spend most of our lives working"

Victor Kiam, Businessman

"Before computers, telephone lines and television connect us, we all share the same air, the same oceans, the same mountains and rivers. We are all equally responsible for protecting them"

Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Actress

"Every now and then, when you're on stage, you hear the best sound a player can hear. It's a sound you can't get in movies or in television. It is the sound of a wonderful, deep silence that means you've hit them where they live"

Shelley Winters, Actress

"In television, everything is gone with the speed of light, literally. It is no field for anybody with intimations of immortality"

Charles Kuralt, Journalist

"Coming back to a television series puts you back in the limelight and gives you a platform for your ideas. If you're not acting on a series, you don't get the ability to communicate to people"

Dennis Weaver, Actor

"I've appeared on a weekly syndicated television show since 1980"

Julian Bond, Activist

"Nothing is really real unless it happens on television"

Daniel J. Boorstin, Historian

"On the one hand, the press, television, and movies make heroes of vandals by calling them whiz kids"

Ken Thompson, Scientist

"The idea of stardom was difficult to grasp. It was like being schizophrenic; there was her, the woman on television, and the real me"

Jessica Savitch, Journalist

"The justices have constitutionally protected obscenity in libraries, filth over cable television, and now unlimited internet pornography"

Phyllis Schlafly, Activist

"In 1949 there was a new thing called Television, to which my agency and advisers opposed as a performance medium"

Loretta Young, Actress

"The movie, if I recall, didn't have to do with the television show because there were concerns from everyone that they didn't want it to be like the TV show"

David Selby, Actor

"I wasn't campaigning for a role in a Hollywood television series, it was a fluke. So you've got to have a measure of good luck, you really have, being in the right place at the right time"

Patrick Stewart, Actor

"I was delighted to have lines when they came - learning lines for film isn't a problem, but television is a little different, because we shot those shows the whole way through"

David Selby, Actor

"They put me on television. And the whole thing broke loose. It was wild, I tell ya for sure"

Elvis Presley, Musician

"I don't want my president to be a TV star. You don't have to be on television every minute of every day - you're the president, not a rerun of 'Law & Order'. TV stars are too worried bout being popular and too concerned about being renewed"

Bill Maher, Comedian

"Television of course actually started in Britain in 1936, and it was a monopoly, and there was only one broadcaster and it operated on a license which is not the same as a government grant"

David Attenborough, Journalist

"I didn't come east of the Mississippi for the first time in my life until I was 26 years of age, but I knew. I read magazines, I listened to radio, I watched television. I knew there was something out there, and I wanted a part of it"

Sam Donaldson, Journalist

"If it weren't for Philo T. Farnsworth, inventor of television, we'd still be eating frozen radio dinners"

Johnny Carson, Comedian

"Imitation is the sincerest form of television"

Fred Allen, Comedian

"In this country, you have movie actors and theatre actors and television actors"

Max von Sydow, Actor

"I've worked in television long enough to know that when you stop enjoying that type of thing you go home and do something else"

Mark Haddon, Novelist

"Why are we, as a nation so obsessed with foreign things? Is it a legacy of our colonial years? We want foreign television sets. We want foreign shirts. We want foreign technology. Why this obsession with everything imported?"

Abdul Kalam, Statesman

"I got my heroes secondhand, from television and movies, to a certain extent"

Brad Bird, Cartoonist

"The difficulty with the present state of affairs is that there is no legislation on the sources of funding for the Polish film industry. There is no legislation concerning filmmaking. And, there is no legislation on television that would be beneficial to filmmaking"

Andrzej Wajda, Director

"Television is an instrument which can paralyze this country"

William Westmoreland, Soldier

"Television has a real problem. They have no page two"

Art Buchwald, Journalist

"As I went to college, I went into radio and television. Now I suppose most people think that's one step ahead of basket weaving as a major in college, but it was part of the journalism department"

Sam Donaldson, Journalist

"Washington is the only city in the world where you can go to a black-tie dinner and there at the foot of the table is a television set up to catch a press conference"

Hugh Newell Jacobsen

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