Chelsea Handler Quotes

In a TV show, you are restricted to a lot of things. On television, you can't put the content you can put on web series and on the channels digitally.

In terms of language, yeah we get bleeped and blurred and things, but in terms of content, I would probably say we're getting away with more here than we could get away with in Britain. And that surprised us so much!

I had kind of sworn off network TV a while ago.

You have tremendous freedom in the young adult book world to write what you want. You can put R-rated content in a book that you can't in a similarly targeted movie.

With network, shows are pulled half the time after three episodes whether they're good or they're not good. It's a numbers game. With cable, they can take a lot more liberties.

I worked at CBS in the late '90s, and I remember sitting in meetings with both advertisers and digerati, and everyone was saying, 'Network TV is dead.'

Creative freedom on television is very limited and I get bored very easily.

The ratings thing is the real issue. It really hurts movies. For example, in Redbelt, I smoked. The whole plot of my character was based on the fact that I was a smoker. And then they discovered that just by having someone smoking in the movie, it immediately makes the rating an R. So they had to cut out every shot where I had a cigarette in my hand and it totally affected the performance. That was very frustrating to David Mamet as well. I can remember him saying, "It's a nightmare."

As soon as I found out how compartmentalized the industry was, I realized, Well, no wonder the cartoons are so bad.

Artists themselves are not confined, but their output is.

Cultural confinement takes place when a curator imposes his own limits on an art exhibition, rather than asking an artist to set his limits.

When I was a kid there were a very select few channels - programmes had to have more of a large appeal and they just didn't offer very much. Now you have a situation where the television world has expanded and there's hundreds of channels.

I think a newspaper should be provocative, stir 'em up, but you can't do that on television. It's just not on.

The only place we were really told to tone it down - where other people would use the word censorship, but I wouldn't - was when we did MTV right after the Beavis and Butt-head thing.

In a world where everyone is a publisher, no one is an editor. And that is the danger that we face today.

In America there's no way I can make the kind of movie I like to make.

In my journey as a cartoonist, I seem to have accidentally stumbled into all sorts of traps, damnations and blacklists.

I love radio, but it's a very limited thing today. Everything has to be edited down to 3:59, and too bad if I didn't make my statement in three minutes and 59 seconds. Everybody's song has to make its point so quickly.

I have very strong views on TV. There's no diversity, there's no choice. Things are decided by committee.

There are obviously legal restrictions on what you can do on TV in the States, as there are everywhere.

The marketing department of any given publishing house has far more power over free expression in America than any government office.

Regardless of the strength of the government's interest [in protecting children,] the level of discourse reaching a mailbox simply cannot be limited to that which would be suitable for a sandbox.

I think that network TV is going to either have to reinvent itself or it's going to have to be more competitive - there are just so many options now with streaming and everything.

It's almost impossible to totally eliminate terrible content in a huge open network.

There seems to be a vulnerability at the networks in late night. They are losing more and more audience, particularly young viewers who are now looking at cable television. 'Tonight' is an old show. CBS has reruns, and having a public affairs series like 'Nightline' on ABC is a big mistake.