Serge Daney Quotes

It's hard to decide if TV makes morons out of everyone, or if it mirrors Americans who really are morons to begin with.

Whatever may be said about the power of the press, it is undeniable that it can set the entire public thinking and talking about any topic ...

I think TV, at least most immediately, perhaps more so than film, is a reflection of society.

Cinema is a reflection of society and, in most cases, has the ability to be a mirror and not just show the problems but also give solutions and help them reach a large number of people through faces and voices that matter.

What's so exciting and unstoppable about the horror genre is that I view it all as metaphorical exploration. It's the safe place that we, as a culture, can deal with things that upset and frighten us - the darker side of our nature.

Cinema is mass media, it is both overtly gross and exciting. It is our great mirror of society.

I think it's pretty classic if you look at the way entertainment reflects the country's status. There was a reason in the '50s when communism was bubbling that there were a million zombie movies. Because that is the direct allocation. So for the last two years we've been hearing, "Make America great again." People go, "Well, America was never great." What do you mean? What you mean is that they want to look back in history. And so I think it's only natural for entertainment to reflect that.

I am, when you stop to think of it, a member of a fairly select group: the final handful of American novelists who learned to read and write before they learned to eat a daily helping of video bullshit.

I believe Hollywood is the most effective and disastrous propaganda factory there has ever been in the history of human beings.

I think we have reached a level in society - with Helen Mirren playing The Queen - when we're not surprised any more. We don't mention names. Yes, it's obvious by inference. But we don't mention names and the film is not up to point fingers at Royalty.

I think novelists perform many useful tasks for their fellow citizens, but one of the most valuable is this: to enable us to see ourselves as others see us.

I don't think there's a specific science you can put on dream psychology. I think that it's up to the, obviously, the individual.

What this generation was bred to at television's knees was not wisdom, but cynicism.

The media is either our salvation or our death.

A first hint of the power of the electronic media to bring disaster directly into living rooms came with the radio broadcast of the explosion of the zeppelin "Hindenburg," in 1937 . . .

What it is is a type of editorialization, you know? This is self-portraiture. This is what you think about the world we live in.

I think that all money can do is to get your message out. Unfortunately, we live in a world where you have to use mass media to communicate with the people, and it just costs an awful lot of money.

Television is the quickest form of recognition in the world.

I think that from the very beginning it wasn't simply, what made Playboy so popular was not simply the naked ladies, what made the magazine so popular was, there was a point of view in the magazine, that you couldn't run nude pictures without some kind of rational that they were art.

Did you ever think about life as a metaphor for television?

The most corrosive piece of technology that I've ever seen is called television - but then, again, television, at its best, is magnificent.

Literature is the voice of the age and the state; the character, energy, and resources of the country are reflected and imaged forth in the conceptions of its great minds; they are organs of the time; they speak not their own language, they scarce think their own thoughts; but under an impulse like the prophetic enthusiasm of old, they must feel and utter the sentiments which society inspires.

Art's true purpose is to be human as opposed to some rarefied activity set away from real life. I think art should help you to navigate the real challenges of being a human being.

I dream about my teeth, losing a tooth, which I think means that you want control back.

In our dreams (writes Coleridge) images represent the sensations we think they cause; we do not feel horror because we are threatened by a sphinx; we dream of a sphinx in order to explain the horror we feel.