Robert Altman Quotes

All television is an advertisement - that's why it exists. It wasn't the art-form first and then the commerce - it was that they could put on entertainment long enough to distract people into looking at products. It's for focusing people on advertising and separating you from money in some way. Some people forget that. The side product is that we get some great eye candy. TV is the best it has ever been right now. I don't have a problem with that since it's what keep us employed.

People have romantic notions about television. In the highest realms they think it's some sort of art medium, and it's not. Others think it's an entertainment medium, it's not that either. It's an advertising medium. It's a method to deliver advertising like a cigarette is a method to deliver nicotine.

I think they [TV productions] were just kind of drying up. I'd done a couple of episodes, but nothing was happening. So I went to Vancouver to visit a buddy and see what was going on, and that year was crazy. Vancouver was on fire at that point. It was all these Stephen J. Cannell productions - The Commish being one of them - and in one I was a bartender, and I think I had five lines.

The music business looks like, you know, innocent schoolboys compared to the TV business. They care about nothing but profit.

Television is a huge industry, and actors down south are aware of it.

Pilot season is always crazy because you audition for a million things, and really, in the end, it's not up to you.

I was disillusioned by Hollywood at the time, but now I've come to accept that's just the way things are: it's called show business, not show art.

Television is a tough business. It's not that easy to jump shops.

Movie is a near art form. It's showbiz and people want to make money. And generally people are financing things because they think it will make money whether it's a cable news show, a cable show, or a feature film, or whatever it is. So that's the part of it that drives it, I think, is really the dollar.

I think that the reason you keep hearing that it's the golden age of TV is because original storytelling is happening all the time in that medium, and people are hungry for it. And I'm as guilty as anyone for being part of an industry that is capitalizing on existing stories, sequels, these things that we are seeing again and again and again.

When you do a television show in the States, you get the pilot, and then it's the great unknown. That's the way it is. It's this great leap of faith. It's the Russian roulette of art.

I think the Grammys are nothing more than some gigantic promotional machine for the music industry. They cater to a low intellect and they feed the masses. They don't honor the arts or the artist for what he created. It's the music business celebrating itself.

I'm a lot happier in people's living rooms weekly than I think I would be if I was really, really relying on a movie career to keep me fulfilled and excited.

We did our best to do a Fox show, frankly, I don't think the difficulties we had at Fox would be exclusive to Fox. It's tough to be funny, because there's so many eyeballs and there's so much money at stake that I think everything is just kind of over-thought. And it's tough to be daring and do something different, either with regards to content or even structure.

TV writers live life of well-paid, specialty prostitutes. We have a very special skill set and we occupy one of the higher floors in the bordello that is writing. We do a very particular job for a very select clientele.

I started on television, and on sitcoms, and loved them, but then they sort of seemed to be going through sort of an ice age, and they started dying off one by one, and I recognized that, and my representatives recognized that, and we said 'Well, let's look at dramas and other things like that.'

Television is for appearing on, not looking at.

Television in America is so elaborate. There are so many remote cranes, and they have all the toys to play with. The directors are really good. They really work with you. So, I'm not really on set thinking, "Oh, my God, this is television. It's very different."

There's so much great TV and I always thought it would be such a fun little sideway to make money and then not have to worry about my films making a lot of money.

It's a really incredible time to be working in television.

Between the marriages, I shagged my way round television studios like a mechanical digger.

Seeing movie people trying to get into TV now who don't understand that is very interesting.

Television is not the truth! Television is a goddamned amusement park. Television is a circus, a carnival, a travelling troupe of acrobats and story-tellers, singers and dancers, jugglers, sideshow freaks, lion-tamers and football players. We're in the boredom-killing business!

A lot of things that people think are risky, I don't think are risky. I don't get all that. I think what was really risky for network television was to let cable television to take the summers.

Halfway through Numbers, I got really jaded, and I had these unrealistic expectations about what Numbers could be. I thought it should be Emmy-nominated. I was in my mid-20s, so I was kind of shortsighted and silly.