A Quote by S. J. Perelman

I used to pride myself on being impervious to the sentimentalities of soap opera, but when that loveliest of actresses, Rachel Gurney, of Upstairs, Downstairs, perished on the Titanic, I wept so convulsively and developed such anorexia that I had to be force-fed.
Misery loves company. This is a Hollywood soap opera, and I'm not going to be a star in another Bryant soap opera.
When you work on a soap opera, that's three years of you working every day. There was no time to do anything other than the soap opera - you're locked in.
Soap opera seems to be a dirty word, but actually they are the most popular shows we have. People want to know what happens next, people hate the villains and love the lovers. It's good, fun TV. But I wouldn't call 'Downton' a soap opera as such.
I mean, for years [my father] would been doing everything imaginable ... from speed to downers to you name it. I used to call that "changing seats on the Titanic," and I used to say that I myself was not only changing seats on the Titanic but dating the crew.
I was playing this role on 'Ugly Betty,' the sweetest, nicest guy. He was a fun character to play, but I was in a Latin soap opera - where are you gonna go with a nice guy in a Latin soap opera?
I have also just finished three weeks on a soap opera in England. The soap opera is a rather famous one called Crossroads. It was first on television 25 years ago, and it has recently been brought back. I play the part of a businessman called David Wheeler.
I knew it, I just knew it! The person who had the job of writing my life's dialogue used to work on a very low budget soap opera.
My father's an opera nut, and my stepmother used to work at the Metropolitan Opera, so I had a lot of opera immersion. I like the grandness and pretention of it.
During the 1970s and 1980s, the popular television soap opera As The World Turns portrayed sunrise during the opening credits and sunset during the closing credits... The soap-opera sunrise showed the sun moving toward the left as it rose rather than to the right. They obviously had gotten a piece of film showing a sunset and played it in reverse... Had they called their local astrophysicists, any one of us might have recommended that if they needed to save money, they could have shown the sunset in a mirror before they showed it running backward.
I remember being 18 and being fed up with everything - fed up with society, fed up with the political system, fed up with myself - and then you kind of go, 'Actually, this voting thing is amazing,' because you have a chance to change it, right?
When I was 15, I came downstairs one morning, picked up mother's newspaper and, oh, what a shock! The Titanic had gone. The 'unsinkable' ship - but it had gone down so simple.
It used to take us six days to film an hour of 'Gunsmoke.' But I didn't mind the fast pace of soap opera work. It was nice being able to shoot scenes in sequence. We couldn't do that on 'Gunsmoke.'
Dumb luck brought on the move from business to acting. I had moved to New York when I was 23, in the year 2000. On a lark, I went to audition for a soap opera. I thought, 'Hey, this will be a really fun story to tell my grandkids one day, that I auditioned for a soap!'
I think of myself as a realistic writer, not a creator of soap opera or melodrama.
My dad became a soap opera actor, and I was an extra in a skating rink scene on the soap. I didn't audition. It was nepotism all the way.
'Upstairs Downstairs' somehow bestrode the different genres that had come before it to create a new drama entity. I suppose that's one of the reasons why it became so instantly popular.
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