Television Impact Quotes

In the old days, a star was someone up there - you know, Greta Garbo - but a telly star was somebody you could approach.

There was a time in the 1930s when magazine writers could actually make a good living. 'The Saturday Evening Post' and 'Collier's' both had three stories in each issue. These were usually entertaining, and people really went for them. But then television came along, and now of course, information technology... the new way of killing time.

1952 was the last year that television covered a political event as if television weren't there.

But obviously as television began, it so undercut movies that he was trying to think of a way to combine seeing these special things, and the fact that people were just captivated by the magic box.

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.

Television is the first truly democratic culture—the first culture available to everybody and entirely governed by what the people want. The most terrifying thing is what people do want.

Even when I started in 1970, I knew that television was having a negative effect on our society.

By the time I was writing the second book, my life had changed rather dramatically, thanks to the intervention of television, and I needed to find a way to discuss that. Otherwise the big, fake book would not be true on some level.

When I started, TV was regarded as something that wasn't as great as film or theatre or radio, but it has proved to have far greater powers than those.

History must only guess at the effect that television would have had during earlier conflicts over the future of the nation.

Before 'The OC,' I was on track to do some great films... and one thing happens, and then I got this mega-stardom all from this show.

People say I owe a lot to television. The fact is I was a star long before television. What TV made me is unemployed.

If I've done anything, I've brought passion to television.

Television really has been responsible for everything that I've done successfully.

I read a great deal as a child. A lot of children go through a phase of reading in a literally voracious way. It is their primary imaginative activity. Maybe that's an experience which is not so common any more with the presence of television in every home.

I think it's terribly important to watch TV. I think there's a sort of minimum number of hours of TV a day you ought to watch, and unless you watch three or four hours of TV a day, you're just closing your eyes to some of the most important sort of stream of consciousness that's going on!

I'll be the first to thank RuPaul, who gave me the money and let me out into the world. RuPaul is an excellent role model. I'm talking about someone who has worked hard in the business for quite some time. RuPaul put gay men in wigs into people's living rooms. RuPaul is the reason that we're not threatening.

The Art of Conversation could not die in Australia; it never lived. Television did not kill it; there was nothing there to kill.

Short of throwing away all television sets, I really don't know what we can do about writing.

Nearly all Americans felt they knew JFK intimately, his charm and wit regularly lighting up the television screen at home. This is why polls showed that millions of Americans took his assassination like a 'death in the family.'

In 1948, television was introduced, and millions and millions of people lead larval, low-awareness, warehoused lives mainlining an electronic drug straight into their brains.

Anything seen on TV is, in a subtle and sinister sense, thereby endorsed.

When I was doing theatre in Mumbai, actors won't come because they had television. For many years, I did theatre religiously and in Mumbai, I saw people disrespecting it and it hurt me very badly.

I was hugely formed by stories I was told as a child whether that was in a book, the cinema, theatre or television and probably television more than any medium is what influenced me as a child and formed my response to literature, story-telling and, therefore, the world around me.

TV has grown so much. It is like a powerhouse medium.