P. J. O'Rourke Quotes

You never know what's going to happen with television these days.

Well, certainly I think American television is - that's proper TV.

People have said that I said I hate television. I never did say that. What I said was that I hated a lot of stuff that was on television. It's nothing about the medium itself.

I feel like obviously the standard for what TV looks like changes all the time.

Television is a golden goose that lays scrambled eggs; and it is futile and probably fatal to beat it for not laying caviar. Anyway, more people like scrambled eggs than caviar.

Every time you think television has hit its lowest ebb, a new program comes along to make you wonder where you thought the ebb was.

Reality TV has totally destroyed soap operas. They're gone. They used to be the biggest thing in the world - they're gone.

I have no problem with television as a genre.

There's not a lot of light on television.

Television has changed. Some feels like good old-fashioned TV, and some of it feels more filmic and more natural and more nuanced. I don't think there's any clear line any longer between film and TV.

The quality of TV, I think, is at an all-time high. The problem with it is the way that we end up consuming it - generally a cable box. A satellite receiver is, to me, nothing more than a glorified VCR.

There's not a lot of good TV.

Television is not a gimmick.

Nowadays, television has taken over big time and I'm really enjoying my stints there.

It feels as though, with all of these cable series or Internet shows or limited series events that are only 10 or 13 episodes... the quality is really rising.

TV is one of the biggest mediums, and over time, it will get bigger.

It's amazing how many people you see on TV. I did my first television show a month ago, and the next day five million television sets were sold. The people who couldn't sell theirs threw them away.

When television is good, nothing - not the theater, not the magazines or newspapers - nothing is better. But when television is bad, nothing is worse. I invite each of you to sit down in front of your television set when your station goes on the air and stay there for a day without a book, without a magazine, without a newspaper, without a profit and loss sheet or a rating book to distract you. Keep your eyes glued to that set until the station signs off. I can assure you that what you will observe is a vast wasteland.

I don't really follow television so much, but in the old days there was a certain way TV was, and it wasn't really like cinema. I don't know how many ways it was different or the same, but it was not quite like cinema. Now, cinema can happen on television.

Television in the 1960s & 70s had just as much dross and the programmes were a lot more tediously patronising than they are now. Memory truncates occasional gems into a glittering skein of brilliance. More television, more channels means more good television and, of course, more bad. The same equation applies to publishing, film and, I expect, sumo wrestling.

The future of American film lies on television.

I do believe that we're in a true golden era of television, and I think it started with 'Hill Street.'

I think TV is the only place left where you can have a midsize something.

English television from the Fifties to the Nineties was the least bad in the world, and now it's just as bad as it is anywhere.

I don't have TiVo, and I actually don't watch a lot of TV, honestly.