LeVar Burton Quotes

All I've ever wanted to do is move the needle on popular culture.

Culture in America and everywhere else comes from the suffering, from those who don't want the old ways. They want to bring in the new, whether it's the ballet, when it started, or Shakespeare.

Fiction is not photography, it's oil painting.

When politics is too slow, change has to come from culture.

That's what ever great writer, I believe, has done over the course of time - is they've figured out new ways of telling the same stories.

What if you could radically alter the way stories get told? What if the way people wanted to consume content actually changed what you could make?

Art at its most significant is a Distant Early Warning System that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it.

Games are getting more interesting. I mean, when we talk about books, they can be anything from a summer blockbuster to 'War and Peace' - well, games are the same. I think the creative side is catching up with the technology.

It is nonsense to say that Germans are unable to change.

Asian literature is evolving with the people. It's always a reflection on what's happening to the culture at large.

I really was interested in doing something for a premium channel like Showtime or HBO, just because you get to really let loose. I think they let their storylines go wherever they want, and it's really a special place to work.

I'm always looking for interesting stories, and I feel in independent film there's more opportunity.

I spent a whole 12 years helping other people tell their stories as a publicist, so just to be able to go and write and get behind the camera, that's my thing.

All I care about is the story and telling the story. I don't care how people ingest it.

In the writers' room, the challenge is always to tell interesting stories in unexpected ways, so we try to never limit ourselves in how we accomplish that.

I feel very strongly as a writer and as a director it is not my job to crush the audience's imagination.

I think we're at a really critical time in terms of art, and I think it's totally possible to have a project that is entertaining but also moving the cultural needle forward. I think it's one of the reasons I'm so grateful to work on 'Billions.'

It is not about whether you are an executive, a studio or a network. If you have a story or an idea you can build a following for it.

Since the very beginning of culture, what we seem to be are animals which take in raw material and excrete it imprinted with ideas.

I'm curious and you know, I really think cinema is strong medium that allows you to go to so many different mental countries, not just geographical countries. As far as it allows me to express something of my own truth, it's fine for me. I can go to the moon.

I used to work in TV and quit the job because I couldn't do it any more. I quite like taking my time over a film, five years is how long it takes me to work something out. And when you just do quick turnover, turnaround, I'm literally this is driving me mad, I want to find another living. I'll just have to find a creative way to tell the story.

The way I think of my work is that I have to think up the way to tell a story, starting from scratch. The changes in the industry concern me in a general way because I think civilization is doomed.

It's how you tell the story that makes it new. That's what artists do. They let us look at the world from a different perspective. They let us look at birds in a way that makes us never see birds again in the same way. That's why I don't think computers are healthy for kids. They're too literal. You pop a button and a bluebird comes out. You pop another button and you can take the color blue and shove it into the outline of the bluebird.

In my own work I am invested in art as a way to break through impasses, whether those impasses are personal, social, or political.

Part of what I love about television is that my imagination gets to keep going. It doesn't stop.