Children playing while in the background the TV blares with screams, gunfire and rape-murder scenes. It seeps in.

Stand-up is different from television. In stand-up, you’ve got to be in control.

Gore Vidal, for instance, once languidly told me that one should never miss a chance either to have sex or to appear on television. My efforts to live up to this maxim have mainly resulted in my passing many unglamorous hours on off-peak cable TV. It was actually Vidal’s great foe William F. Buckley who...

Many of the people who consented to talk about their private lives in front of millions of television viewers would say that they were sharing their stories as a way to give comfort [to] fellow sufferers, to raise public awareness, to give a voice to their pain. None of them would ever admit that it...

Is my coitus whimsically inventive?

To paraphrase Muggeridge: Everything is a parable that God is speaking to us, the art of life is to get the message.

My experience as a young actor on network television was that I couldn’t make it work. I was drowning as an actor.

Television knows no night. It is perpetual day. TV embodies our fear of the dark, of night, of the other side of things.

Scheduling is too much in this league for television and not enough for the players. It’s very disheartening to look at scheduling and see that. Granted, TV’s important, but it shouldn’t run the league.

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...

People are sheep. TV is the shepherd.

If I can go through what I’ve been through and do a television show with my son and then be a boy from the hood making records for the people I make records for, that’s reality.

I’ve seen him many times on television. I don’t think I could hit him.

We’re just scratching the surface in Turin. The television will become more obsolete.

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.

With correction, and given the chance, ‘Terra Nova’ can and will deliver seasons of transcendent images and story-telling. Failing to renew ‘Terra Nova’ is shortsighted, as myopic as it would have been to scrap the Hubble. ‘Terra Nova’ is the Hubble Telescope of television.

I devised a test.I turned off the TV and instantly the snoring stopped. She began to move. When I felt her eyes about to open, I turned the TV back on and back to sleep she went. Then I’d turn it off and on – sometimes for millisecond – and she never failed me. Each...

I am a stage actor. I do mostly improv comedy. The only national television stuff is ‘Archer’ and’ Frisky Dingo.’

One of the benefits to television is that you’re with these characters for years, you know them so well.

We need to look to our laurels a bit with television in this country. I don’t think enough risks are being taken in drama television in the U.K., and I think a lot of programme makers are underestimating the intelligence of the viewing public, basing it all on ratings.

So much of television is incredibly predictable. You watch the first five minutes and you know where it’s going to go. If you can just create an element of surprise in both the storytelling and tone of a show, you’re going to be way ahead of the pack.

I am a street performer as much as I am a stage performer. Yes, I have a television show, but every trick, every ‘Mindfreak’ you see, I can do live.

Sometimes You Gotta Break the Rules”? How can an Image-Fiction writer hope to make people more critical of televisual culture by parodying television as a self-serving commercial enterprise when Pepsi and Subaru and FedEx parodies of self-serving commercials are already doing big business? It’s almost a history lesson: I’m starting to see just why turn-of-the-century...

The value in my room is neither my Television nor my bank note. The value in my room is myself! Why? Because even if I lose everything I have, but still get me, I am coming back with full passion and desperation to climb the unclimbed hills again and again!

In the end, they will say this of the human race: they had the freedom to go anywhere, but sat in front of the television. They were each responsible for saving the world, but they turned over the channel.

I want my kids to see me as Dad, for God’s sake, not a television personality.

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

[…] 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...

Fernsehen macht die Klugen klüger und die Dummen dümmer.

Americans no longer talk to each other, they entertain each other. They do not exchange ideas, they exchange images. They do not argue with propositions; they argue with good looks, celebrities and comercials.

For good health, watch what you eat. For a good head, watch what you watch.

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’.

I think it just looks absurd for us constantly to shovel out tax breaks when executives go on television and say they aren’t needed, … They don’t need tax incentives.

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 had to start watching [The Real Housewives of New Jersey] every week because, well, my IQ was just too high. I mean seriously up there. What can I tell you? After watching every episode, I am now officially as dumb as that brown, particle-like stuff you find outside and don’t want to track inside...

What they want to censor, what they want to regulate are the most popular television shows. We’re mistaking the will of the PTC for the will of the public. … It really is a form of censorship.

I expect the audience to assume TV is stupid. I accept that it’s my job to overcome it.

There is one category of advertising which is totally uncontrolled and flagrantly dishonest: the television commercials for candidates in Presidential elections.

I would really like to do a movie. Schedule-wise I don’t know when exactly, but I think it would be great to do a Portlandia movie. Some of my favorite television shows have done it and they’ve been great. Like Monty Python. I think it would be great.

One of the things I like most about doing a television series is that I really don’t have any idea what is going to happen, … I love that.

I think that television and the web are fusing anyway, so I think that ultimately whatever I do, I’m going to blend the two forms.

I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.

It’s not listed in the Bible, but my spiritual gift, my specific calling from God, is to be a television talk-show host.

I think television scripts have become really intriguing and well-done. And writers have stopped drawing any actual line between film and television they used to never cross.

It is a significant acknowledgment that the way people are watching television is changing and the model is quickly changing.

Do you know we are being led toSlaughters by placid admirals& that fat slow generals are gettingObscene on young bloodDo you know we are ruled by t.v.

Many decisions about the form and content of news programs are made on the basis of information about the viewer, the purpose of which is to keep the viewers watching so that they will be exposed to the commercials

I think it sort of dawns on you that if you’re not gigging constantly you’re not actually relevant. You may be relevant to a different part of the media now, to television commissioners and editors, but to a young live-comedy audience you’re not, really.

[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...

Immediately after the terror attacks, we were shell-shocked and stopped doing everything but watching television,