Top 1200 American Television Quotes & Sayings - Page 2

I'm from a little village in the south of Holland where there was nothing to do but watch American movies and television - I grew up with The 'A-Team,' 'Charlie's Angels,' and 'Edward Scissorhands.'

Television is not the truth! Television is a goddamned amusement park. Television is a circus, a carnival, a travelling troupe of acrobats and story-tellers, singers and dancers, jugglers, sideshow freaks, lion-tamers and football players. We're in the boredom-killing business!

Opera on television in Europe is very important. If you think about it in the broadest sense: a lot of the dramas made in India with music are practically operas. They're not sung but they have a very big appeal. I don't know why American television people are so stupid but at the moment, they just seem to have some sort of a block. They just do what they do and they do it for a certain number of years. Then it wears out and they try something else. It's just a matter of time I think.

Race is a core reality of American experience. Media images on television need to reflect that reality to help people who consume media and who don't have the day-to-day, face-to-face contact with others, or where that contact is minimal, to help them have a greater appreciation of other experiences and how they're all part of the American fabric.

I wish the American public wasn't so stupid if they realized that half the people on television make a living just to insult the other party.

I would love to get a role that changes the landscape of being an African American woman in television and film.

I would really like to focus on directing features, and then eventually take that skill set back to television. On features, you have more control. On television, the producers are the creative forces behind it. Directors come and go on television.

Most Australians who've got an ear can do an American accent because we grow up listening to them on television and in movies.

I can think of nothing more boring for the American people than to have to sit in their living rooms for a whole half hour looking at my face on their television screens.

Unfortunately, in television today there are very few African-American characters who are human beings. They are typically two-dimensional stereotypes, cookie-cutter types.

Pete Rozelle used television to get the game to the American public by creating the Super Bowl and making it the biggest sporting event in the world.

It still baffles my brain that I actually get to portray a character on American television that's this gay, femme-y Filipino guy.

There was a time when I said, "I'm going to go do a television thing," after doing all these theatrical films, and heard, "Television? Why are you going to go back to television?" It's an interesting place.

I've really dreamed of doing television. All of us do television, coming up. But when I was coming up, television was a black hole for actors. Now, television has a certain cache. Now everybody wants to be on TV because they're doing adult dramas. If you're an actor, it's like, "Well, get me on television," because it's the only place you can do it and also make a living at it. If my kids need shoes, I better do a TV show because I damn sure don't make any money with independent films.

MTV essentially killed 'American Bandstand' and 'Solid Gold,' because music videos are an easier way for pop artists to gain television exposure.

Film and television are major vehicles for American storytelling, and America is the biggest exporter and influencer in the world in terms of telling stories.

I really wanted to work in the American industry because it's the leading industry. It's where film and television started.

I think the challenge in hour television or half-hour television is that the more it's around, certainly on commercial television, the less time you have to tell stories these days, because the more commercials they're putting in.

I make my living doing freelance directing for North American television shot in Toronto, series like Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Twilight Zone, and so forth.

For one year, I want to do this thing where I guest-star on as many television shows as I possibly can. I love television. The fact that television ultimately made me famous was very gratifying for me.

I had never thought of doing television. But my agent wanted me to meet John Wells, who had had a lot of success producing ER and China Beach. The night before the meeting, some friends were over for dinner and Akiva Goldsman and I slipped downstairs to the basement so we could sneak a cigarette. He said, "You know what would make a good television series? That." And he was pointing at The American President poster. He said, "There doesn't have to be a romance, just focus on a senior staffer."

I've been watching American baseball on television for a long time, but it was only in recent years that, realistically, I've been thinking about playing here.

Pro wrestling has always been ingrained into American culture. It was one of the first things that was ever on television, so everybody watched it.

I've got nothing against any individual American, except that there aren't any. They're always Irish-American, African-American... There's never an American-American you can blame.

There's no mistaking the fact that some of the best longform fiction out there now is in American television. 'The Wire' and 'Deadwood' and 'The Sopranos.'

Reality television is to television what marble and gold are to real estate. The point is to dispense with the idea of taste. It's all id. The more unrestrained the better. We all know that 'reality' in reality television is not real. That anybody who would participate in reality television is a fake. But pretending otherwise makes them real.

In the U.K., we're surrounded by American accents. Anything we watch in television. We have 'How I Met Your Mother' and all these other shows here, so it's not something that's really alien to us.

I've never understood the cult of Hitchcock. Particularly the late American movies... Egotism and laziness. And they're all lit like television shows.

In the U.S., these sights are no longer a surprise to me. I see army generals, captains of industry, and politicians of all colours and creeds on American television.

You can be a Polish American, or an Arab American, or a Greek American but you can't be English American. Why not?

One of the great upsides to a national book tour is the chance to break out of television's cocoon and interact directly with the American people.

Whereas Absurdism in Europe seemed a logical, almost inevitable response to the irrationality of war, the analogous elements that surfaced in American drama seemed more a response to a materialist society run amok. The American-style Absurdism seemed to spring full-blown out of television advertisements and situation comedies, which had become new myth-making machines.

Somebody should tell the president of Mexico that when he appears on American television, he should speak English.

It is so cool to think that there are two female, Indian actresses on prime-time American network television who are considered attractive and funny and smart.

The Biggest Loser,' 'The Voice,' and 'American Idol'... they're giving people opportunities to do what they've always dreamed of doing... to me, that's great reality television.

The best of American television is thought-provoking, original, brilliant, exciting - from 'The Sopranos' on, whether it's 'The Wire' or 'Breaking Bad' or 'House of Cards,' they're fantastic pieces of art.

The fact that we are playing Latinos does not mean that you have to be shouting 'fiesta,' 'taco,' or talking in the same way most Latin characters do in American television.

I'm on record saying that HBO is the best television company in the world, and I believe they are. I think they absolutely understand how to make television that is really, really vital and interesting and visceral, and all the things that television really should be.

The American television punditocracy - the pollsters, political consultants and other talking heads who become as ubiquitous as air every election cycle - can be incestuous and herdlike.

Canadian cities looked the way American cities did on television.

It's just amazing how television permeates the entire world from people who are just listeners and viewers to people of considerable importance who find relaxation watching television. Somebody called it a talking lamp. Television, that is.

Local television is a slightly different story. It is under much more pressure in the same way that all local businesses are, whether that's a local newspaper, local radio or local television. But I think television in the aggregate is actually in very good shape.

Video games are the first new artistic medium since television, but they are more different from television than television was from cinema; they are the newest new thing since the arrival of the movies just over a century ago.

I abhor television. Notice how i said ‘television’ and not ‘TV’ because TV is a nickname and nicknames are for friends and television is no friend of mine.

I've got a lot to say about television. There's a lot going on in television right now and I feel like a huge part of television.

My goal is to broaden and deepen the range of African-American characters on television, so I always try to show human beings.

In television, the audience has to be comfortable with you, and Ive managed to prove that I can be in American homes to some degree, and not necessarily where everyone knows me, either.

The American War of Independence is the expulsion of the intrusive elements, alien to the American essence. If American reality is the reinvention of itself, whatever is found in any way irreducible or unassimilable is not American.

By the age of 18, the average American has witnessed 200,000 acts of violence on television, most of them occurring during Game 1 of an NHL playoff series.

Dan Rather pulling on a sweater and thereby winning a whole new chunk of the populace: That's television. President Reagan's press conferences: That's television. Keith Jackson is television. So are Kermit the Frog, instant replay, and the Fiesta Bowl.

For a subject worked and reworked so often in novels, motion pictures, and television, American Indians remain probably the least understood and most misunderstood Americans of us all.

The good television of today is probably better than the best television of the old days. The bad television of today is worse. It is not only bad - it is damaging, meretricious, seedy and cynical.

American movie audiences now just don’t seem to be very interested in any kind of ambiguity or any kind of real complexity of character or narrative - I’m talking in large numbers, there are always some, but enough to make hits out of movies that have those qualities. I think those qualities are now being seen on television and that people who want to see stories that have those kinds of qualities are watching television.

I'd rather spend my time with grape growers than actors. In the film industry, all the money is focused on television and the stupidity of American cinema.

The process of doing films is not my favorite, but I love television. Television is a quicker turnaround. You shoot more during the day, which makes me feel more productive. It would be like, 'I did five scenes today and ten pages.' That's television.

Anytime a movie or television show retreats into certain American pasts, I'm both annoyed and relieved.

Television is competitive now, and the great stories live on television right now. I'm finding that I'm enjoying television more than film, these days. That was my motivation to take a TV show.

So why do people keep on watching? The answer, by now, should be perfectly obvious: we love television because television brings us a world in which television does not exist. In fact, deep in their hearts, this is what the spuds crave most: a rich, new, participatory life.

In television, the audience has to be comfortable with you, and I've managed to prove that I can be in American homes to some degree, and not necessarily where everyone knows me, either.

American families want high-quality children's television programming. Unfortunately, due to outdated rules, broadcasters are hamstrung from meeting market demand.