[T]his readiness to assume the guilt for the threats to our environment is deceptively reassuring: We like to be guilty since, if we are guilty, it all depends on us. We pull the strings of the catastrophe, so we can also save ourselves simply by changing our lives. What is really hard for us (at...

I received comments on how extraordinary it was that I could keep up speaking for exactly 45 minutes. Indeed, in an age of soundbites lasting some seconds and of quick quotes in the news, all those minutes do seem like an eternity, easy to get lost in. Yet, wait a moment. Television is not the...

You should’ve thought of that before becoming a fireman.””Thought!” he said. “Was I given a choice? I was raised to think the best thing in the world is not to read. The best thing is television and radio and ball games and a home I can’t afford and, Good Lord, now, only now I realize...

What do a few lies on TV matter? They can be swallowed, digested and excreted, or follow people when they doze off to sink into oblivion.

Wenn ich alleine fernsehe, habe ich meine eigenen Regeln und schalte nur ab, nachdem etwas Gutes passiert ist, oder so, dass die letzten Worte, die man hört, einen nicht verletzen. Man will doch nicht abschalten, wenn zwei Leute mitten im Streit sind oder wenn jemand gerade ‘Schwein’ sagt oder ‘Tod’ oder ‘Mein Auto ist verreckt’.

Television has been the single greatest shaper of emptiness.

We want the surprise to be transitive like the impatient thump which unexpectedly restores the picture to the television set, or the electric shock which sets the fibrillating heart back to its proper rhythm.

Reading, for me, is like this: consumptive, pleasing, calming, as much as edifying. It’s how I feel after a good dinner. That’s why I do it so often: It feels wonderful. The book is mind and I insert myself into it, cover it entire, ear my way through every last slash and dot. That’s something...

Sometimes the intensity and the grind of doing television can wear you down, but at the same time there’s something about the repetition, the sheer mass of work that you do that’s also liberating.

Television is the soma of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.

Keisha Blake, whose celebrated will and focus did not leave her much room for angst, watched her friend ascend to the top deck in her new panda-eyed makeup and had a mauvais quart d’heure, wondering whether she herself had any personality at all or was in truth only the accumulation and reflection of all the...

Television and I grew up together.

There is a large group that’s not represented on television – the group that falls somewhere in the middle of straight and gay. That group is looked down on, because people say, ‘You can’t be in-between. You have to pick one or the other.’

One of the big headlines is that network TV is strong. Overall, television usage among total viewers is up about 4 percent … and the growth in cable is not coming at the expense of the broadcast networks.

You think what I’m doing is cruel, sadistic, but it isn’t… you aren’t even a real person, you don’t understand.”Alecto said nothing back to her.The television screen faded to black and Mandy just sat there in the darkness, her expression blank.

I don’t think any industry was ever as closely scrutinized and written about and constantly in the public eye as television.

I had a really normal childhood except I acted. It was like, my brother played soccer, and I was on television sometimes.

I pitched my last children’s show presentation in the mid 1980’s. The era of locally produced children’s shows was over and the networks were not and are not interested in children’s television.

I’m not up on today’s television for children, because it’s mostly cartoons that don’t seem to interest me.

I am, when you stop to think of it, a member of a fairly select group: the final handful of American novelists who learned to read and write before they learned to eat a daily helping of video bullshit.

A democratic civilization will save itself only if it makes the language of the image into a stimulus for critical reflection — not an invitation for hypnosis.

Twin Peaks was special because it was so groundbreaking. In the early ’90s it really changed television a lot. A bunch of weird shows, like Northern Exposure, came on after that.

Nowadays films and television are what I like to call “Microwave Media”. I like mine in the oven, giving the production time to simmer; get the juices flowing, and cooked to perfection. And that takes time. Slow, precious, tempered time. A script is a film’s recipe. It’s just a piece of paper to the novice...

It’s been suggested that if the super-naturalists really had the powers they claim, they’d win the lottery every week. I prefer to point out that they could also win a Nobel Prize for discovering fundamental physical forces hitherto unknown to science. Either way, why are they wasting their talents doing party turns on television?By all...

Kill your 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.

I spent much of my childhood in northern Quebec, and often there was no radio, no television – there wasn’t a lot to entertain us. When it rained, I stayed inside reading, writing, drawing.

But it is not time constraints alone that produce such fragmented and discontinuous language. When a television show is in process, it is very nearly impermissible to say, “Let me think about that” or “I don’t know” or “What do you mean when you say…?” or “From what sources does your information come?” This type...

Moreover, we have seen enough by now to know that technological changes in our modes of communication are even more ideology-laden than changes in our modes of transportation. Introduce the alphabet to a culture and you change its cognitive habits, its social relations, its notions of community, history and religion. Introduce the printing press with...

With television, we vault ourselves into a continuous, incoherent present.

There is nothing wrong with entertainment. As some psychiatrist once put it, we all build castles in the air. The problems come when we try to live in them. The communications media of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with telegraphy and photography at their center, called the peek-a-boo world into existence, but we...

I was raised, I feel like, on television, definitely a child of TV, and was always fascinated by storytelling.

In television, the writer-creator-showrunner is embraced as the creative mind.

Italian voters are not going to be overly impressed by television footage of Berlusconi with George Bush. The overriding issue in these elections is the economy. In 2001, Italians voted for Berlusconi because he promised they would be better off: actually they feel worse off.

Just watching TV as a kid, for a long time I thought, as a young kid, obviously when I was, like, 4 or 5, I thought that people lived in the television.

I don’t want to sound too bleeding heart, because I know how lucky I’ve been, but I never knew how hard it was to be the lead in a television show.

I spent my time drinking and staring at a television in the airport bar. More death and destruction. Crime. Pollution. All the news stories were telling me to be frightened. All the commercials were telling me to buy things I didn´t need. The message was that people could only be passive victims or consumers.

One of the differences between HBO and other television is that they demand the same coverage that you would have in a feature film. We need to have all the shots in order to make it as rich and as stunning as it looks. We can’t cut any corners.

Confession: I don’t want everybody to be beautiful, not in that unlined, creaseless, symmetrical way. Android beauty, like it comes out of a test tube. Beauty without blemish or mark. Not only do I not identify with such people, I don’t believe in them either. I don’t even find them attractive. This is what makes...

People love a happy ending. So every episode, I will explain once again that I don’t like people. And then Mal will shoot someone. Someone we like. And their puppy.

Well, fame is a drug and when you take it away from an addict, things can get ugly.

[…] I’d wake up in the middle of the night to the Star-Spangled Banner and some old film of a flag blowing in the wind, telling you the day was over and it was long past time to go to bed. That was back when days used to end, before CNN and infomercials, before all...

He couldn’t make the thought go anywhere, and soon zoned out into watching the television screen. It showed a crazy-haired old gent tramping around an undistinguished patch of countryside. He couldn’t remember selecting the channel, and with the sound off it really wasn’t very interesting. Was it worth turning the sound up? Probably not. It...

We are not printing a newspaper. We are doing a television advertisement.

Television really has been my vehicle. I don’t get played on the radio much, so I’ve relied on TV a lot.

I was about 12 years old and I was sitting watching the television and it was some kind of talent show, you know, and on marches this monkey, this ape, in a pair of red-checked trousers with a little matching jacket holding a ukelele and it started jigging around playing it, and it was looking...

I was dreading all of the ghost stories of working on American television, not in the least, the length. In Britain, a series is six episodes of an hour drama, maybe sometimes eight, but never twenty-two, so I was petrified of that.

The essence of physical education in Naperville 203 is teaching fitness instead of sports. The underlying philosophy is that if physical education class can be used to instruct kids how to monitor and maintain their own health and fitness, then the lessons they learn will serve them for life. And probably a longer and happier...

The chief problem with television is that, for those who watch it consistently, it undermines and eventually destroys the ability to think. This is because it communicates primarily images, not by words, and words are necessary if we are to perceive logical connections and make judgments as to what is right and wrong.

They are gearing up to fight new competitors, the cable-television industry, for the complete bundle of services, including telephone, television, wireless and Internet.