Fred Allen Quotes

We live in a visual world now.

I'm constantly being visually stimulated.

Our generation is the most cinematically saturated of all time. Videotapes, DVD's, streaming... Spielberg... all of it has thrust us into an endless loop of consumption.

Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies; it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution. Poignant longings for beauty, for an end to probing below the surface, for a redemption and celebration of the body of the world. Ultimately, having an experience becomes identical with taking a photograph of it.

Whether one likes it or not, the screen is a profoundly important source of imagery and storytelling for this generation. For me, books remain a stunning place to tell stories, but the screen has a place.

There are more clocks than ever - clocks on computers, on cell phones, on televisions, on any screen available, telling time to the digital second - but they all seem to matter less.

That's what the internet is: it's like bombarding your eyeballs with these myriad blinking colour lights. It's like trying to watch a movie on your phone in the middle of Times Square.

For all the sophistication of a world in which most of our waking hours are spent consuming or interacting with media, we have scarcely advanced in our understanding of what attention means.

The entertainment world, television, movies, social media, YouTube stuff, we're so bombarded with so much imagery and such a great sense of inhumanity, and there is a coarseness, a coarsening of interaction.

But I think we're also just talking about the literacy of the audience. The visual literacy of the audience. They've seen so many images now, especially here in the States. There's so much to look at, to watch. So the visual storytelling literacy is harder to impress.

I'm really visually stimulated more than anything. I don't really listen to music. I'm more into watching telly or watching movies and visual art.

If it keeps up, man will atrophy all his limbs but the push-button finger.

Sometimes I think that our culture lives in its soundbites.

I think that our civilisation is very much a visual civilisation - television and videos and all this.

One thing about computers and iPhones is they're making people mentally lazy.

We're living in this world where we have so much media all the time. We have access to imagery all the time.

A modern audience is capable of processing just so much information because they're used to visual media that's on overload.

Fezzik's in trouble, bubble bubble, His brain is just not in the pink, His mind is rubble, rub-a-dub double, Because everyone needs him to think.

I really just drew off of where we are now, with reality TV. You can't help but see a lot of it. You choose to watch some, but with some, you just can't help but hear it and see it. It's just piercing in your brain. That piercing is what I was tapping into , with whatever they were doing to pierce into the minds of everybody. It takes a certain kind of person to shut your mind off to the consequences and just try to get results. That's what I was going for - results.

Images have become our true sex objects. It is this promiscuity and the ubiquity of images, this viral contamination of images which are the fatal characteristics of our culture.

The nerds provide the toys that distract the morons. So the nerds are sort of the new drug-dealers. We're the drug dealers of the 21st century because we provide all the brain candy for the mouth-breathers, for lack of a better word.

Americans are used to being pandered to and spoon-fed everything. In a culture that needs caffeine-free cherry chocolate diet Coke, you'd best deliver information with entertainment.

Modern man is assailed on every side and almost without interruption by noise - of the radio, of television, of headlines, of advertising and of the cinema - of which the greatest part, far from enlightening the mind, blunts and stultifies it.

In an automobile civilization, which was one of constant motion and activity, there was almost no time to think; in a television one, there is small desire.

Today there is no greater force in the molding of the North American mind than the invasion of the imagination by the visual media.