Television And American Quotes

#1. Most of my life I was occupied with American television and American food. My ethnicity was my choice. It still is.

Isaac Mizrahi

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

Don Cornelius

#3. The American child, driven to school by bus and stupefied by television, is losing contact with reality. There is an enormous gap between the sheer weight of the textbooks that he carries home from school and his capacity to interpret what is in them.

Marguerite Yourcenar

#4. 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.

Oliver North

#5. 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.

Bruce Boxleitner

#6. I grew up watching a lot of American television and so the American sound has been in my psyche somehow for a long time and is quite familiar and so that does make it easier.

Toni Collette

#7. Even if every program were educational and every advertisement bore the seal of approval of the American Dental Association, we would still have a critical problem. It's not just the programs but the act of watching television hour after hour after hour that's destructive.

Ellen Goodman

#8. I have done film, television and theatre - all at a pretty substantial level - I don't think it's possible for American actors to do that.

Helen Mirren

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

Atom Egoyan

#10. And I believe that public broadcasting has an important trust with the American people, it's an intimate medium of television, and that we can do reading and language development for young children without getting into human sexuality.

Margaret Spellings

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

Jason Gann

#12. Ratings to me are a little like the Chinese Government. I don't fully understand what makes a rating go. I don't know what makes the American television audience respond to one person and not t another. There very seldom are great differences between many television personalities.

Tom Brokaw

#13. I used to watch a lot of American and British television as a child, which helped teach me the language and accents; it was partly that which landed me the part of Roxy in a London production of 'Chicago' when I was 25.

Birgitte Hjort Sorensen

#14. American television constantly tries to co-op British comedy and create their own version of it. Most of the time it doesn't work; obviously, in the case of 'The Office,' it did. But a lot of times, it doesn't really work.

Chris Hardwick

#15. 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.

Maisie Williams

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

Candice Patton

#17. As slavery died for the greater good of America, and the movement for equality sputtered to life, the white woman was on the cover of every American magazine. She was the dazzling jewel on every movie screen, the glory of every commercial and television show.

Jill Scott

#18. What I can say that's different in American television ... in Britain, they wouldn't cancel something after a couple of episodes. In the States they would. They would just decide it's not working, take it off and put something else in on the fall schedule.

John Barrowman

#19. It's the open ocean right now because it's so unique. It's a really unique way of doing American television. There are a million possibilities. We can stay with the cops. We can introduce new worlds. And, who knows where it will end.

Veena Sud

#20. My mom and dad were divorced, and although they got along very well, my mom thought American television was reprehensible, so I was raised on the BBC. I kind of agreed with her. We watched American news, though.

Joss Whedon

#21. 'Heroes', 'Desperate Housewives', 'The Sopranos' - they're all very stylised. 'The Wire' is much more rooted in realism and honesty. In American television, I can't think of anything I'd rather have been in because it has got something to say and that is the kind of thing I want to do.

Aidan Gillen

#22. American television is very much created by the writers, just the volume of it. The writers are so key. You're just trying to do something that serves that script. And in general, film isn't all about the script, really.

Richard Ayoade

#23. 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.

Stephen King

#24. The six and one-fourth hours' television watching (the American average per day) which non-reading children do is what is called alpha-level learning. The mind needn't make any pictures since the pictures are provided, so the mind cuts current as low as it can.

Carol Bly

#25. Each day, the American housewife turns toward television as toward a lover. She feels guilty about it, and well she might, for he's covered with warts and is only after her money.

Mignon McLaughlin

#26. I think you had the GOP down there in North Carolina reaching out to African-American voters and this guy coming on television and using the N-word and saying what Don Yelton said.

Aasif Mandvi

#27. You know I got kicked out of high school and I used to go to Hendrix concerts. I used to go see Marvin Gaye and B.B. King and so here I am on television as an actor playing the part of this really sweet wholesome all American boy. The reality was I had a much different kind of teenage life.

David Cassidy

#28. I wanted to branch out into American television, specifically because you get to develop a character for a longer period of time and you get to develop a relationship with the audience.

Joseph Morgan

#29. The standardization of world culture, with local popular or traditional forms driven out or dumbed down to make way for American television, American music, food, clothes and films, has been seen by many as the very heart of globalization.

Fredric Jameson

#30. Laughter on American television has taken the place of the chorus in Greek tragedy. It is unrelenting; the news, the stock-exchange reports, and the weather forecast are about the only things spared.

Jean Baudrillard

#31. By the twelfth day of his fast, Raju himself has become a tourist attraction. Before an enormous crowd and an American television crew, the starving man is helped down to the drought-stricken river to pray:

R.K. Narayan

#32. I look in the eyes and I see the heart. As long as it's a human story. I would like to turn on my television and see African American, Hispanic, Asian as well as Caucasian. And I think there are probably more people like me.

Angela Bassett

#33. Adeline hadn't owned a television since 1992.
She'd suffered fifteen years hearing about how the Internet would transform American culture and open new avenues of expression.
But in the end, it was only more people talking about television.

Jarett Kobek

#34. When I began to think about the head of the family, the storyteller, the rise of television which became the new storyteller, the break-up of the American family as an idea and then Avalon came.

Barry Levinson

#35. The average American child, by age eighteen, is estimated to have seen eighteen thousand murders and two hundred thousand acts of violence on television. The "death play" of popular video games is accelerating these numbers to ever-higher levels.

Richard J. Borden

#36. That happiness is to be attained through limitless material acquisition is denied by every religion and philosophy known to mankind, but is preached incessantly by every American television set.

Robert Neelly Bellah

#37. Violent video games played in public places are a tiny fraction of the media violence to which modern American children are exposed. Tiny - and judging from the record of this case not very violent compared to what is available to children on television and in movie theaters today.

Richard Posner

#38. I did not see myself as a leading lady. I thought I was really funny-looking and I would never be the lead, and I certainly would never do film or television. I wanted to do theater. I wanted to be the grand dame of the American stage.

Kathy Baker

#39. For thousands and thousands of American kids, libraries are the only safe place they can find to study, a haven free from the dangers of street or the numbing temptations of television. As schools cut back services, the library looms even more important to countless children.

Scott Turow

#40. In the film industry, all the money is focused on television and the stupidity of American cinema.

Gerard Depardieu

#41. 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.'

Kevin Barry

#42. Even in Australia I'd say 80 percent of our television was American. I grew up watching Alfred Hitchcock Presents and The Twilight Zone. I used to sit with my mum when I was just nine years old, trying to guess what the twist would be. I love that kind of thing.

Jacki Weaver

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

Orson Welles

#44. When I'm on television, I'm talking to millions of people, so the conversation is totally different. My words are different. My diction is different because now I'm really talking American English and not homeboy English.

Keyshawn Johnson

#45. I think there's a lot of anesthesia being - that's been pumped into American culture, the mass media television, various forms of entertainment, and the illusion of wealth that we now understand to be an illusion as well as the illusion that America is a world power.

Parker Palmer

#46. 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.

John F. Kennedy

#47. I have heard Mr. Romney's speech's many times on television and the radio and I have even read his book No Apology: The Case for American Greatness and I must say that out of all the gentleman running for the presidency Mr. Romney is, in my opinion, the best one to fit the bill.

Angela Lansbury

#48. I didn't watch a lot of American television growing up. I just liked to read a lot and watch movies - movies, movies, and more movies. My family used to make fun of me because I'd like every movie I saw.

Joss Whedon

#49. Television's escapist programming naturally continues to endorse living beyond one's means as the time-tested American Way and rarely depicts families or individuals wracked by the pressures and miseries that come with excess.

Tom Shales

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

Jacki Weaver

#51. Even though I'm English, I've all my life been heavily exposed to American television and culture in general.

Dominic West

#52. When you decide you want to become a television writer, you naively assume it's going to be like the writers on the old 'Dick Van Dyke Show.' You'll write something and they'll just put it on TV. But what you quickly discover is that American network television is television by committee.

Jeffrey Klarik

#53. I guess probably in my time in politics, it continued to be affirmed to me that the African-American community, despite being subscription television's most valuable customers, they are very underserved by cable and satellite television programming options.

J. C. Watts

#54. In its effect on family relationships, in its facilitation of parental withdrawal from an active role in the socialization of their children, and in its replacement of family rituals and special events, television has played an important role in the disintegration of the American family.

Marie Winn

#55. Playing a positive role on a network television show, it was great. I took it as a responsibility. Poncherello was supposed to be Poncherelli, and then when I got this part I said, 'You know what, this guy isn't going to be Italian-American, he's gonna be Hispanic American.' And they went with it.

Erik Estrada

#56. When people see the terrible scenes of violence on television, when we mourn the death of each and every American man and woman in uniform or a civilian that's killed, that it's hard to see the progress that's being made and it's hard to believe that this is all going to come out for the better.

Condoleezza Rice

#57. We cannot negotiate with people who say what's mine is mine and what's yours is negotiable.
[ The Berlin Crisis: Radio and Television Address to the American People (The White House, July 25, 1961)]

John F. Kennedy

#58. My parents found what I was interested in and encouraged me. They didn't put me in front of a television and buy lots of toys, the way some American parents do.

Nastassja Kinski

#59. The biggest police gun battle ever to take place on American soil had begun, and it was on live television. -

Jeffrey Toobin

#60. Like television, motion pictures, and computers, [Stephen] King has replaced reading ... the triumph of the genial King is a large emblem of the failures of American education.

Harold Bloom

#61. Television is like the American toaster, you push the button and the same thing pops up everytime.

Alfred Hitchcock

#62. That makes entertaining television. That is the circus of American Idol . We go for the very, very best and the very, very worst. It's the boring people that we don't want to see on television.

Nigel Lythgoe

#63. One week before my 17th birthday, I had a blind date with June Rose, a television actress on network soap operas, a model, and a regular on the popular Dick Clark's Saturday night 'American Bandstand' show from New York. We were married five years later, one week after my graduation from Columbia.

Robert C. Merton

#64. There's definitely a wave of Brits doing great work on American television, and I wouldn't mind being one of them!

Rob James-Collier

#65. One of the reasons a strategist never sits in a stadium and gets caught up in the crowds - and never sits watching a debate in person - is because the vast majority of American voters watch these political events on television.

Ed Rollins