Episodic Quotes & Sayings

I'm a sports fanatic. It's hard for me to commit to the weekly, episodic nature of television, so for me, anytime that I can put a game on, that's what I do. — James Roday

I wanted life to be episodic. I wanted to be a magazine photographer and I was willing to do what it took to become that. — Sam Abell

In episodic TV you have to keep things secret to keep the viewer in suspense. — David Giuntoli

Trends working at least marginally towards the implantation of a very narrow range of attitudes, memories and opinions include control of major television networks and newspapers by a small number of similarly motivated powerful corporations and individuals, the disappearance of competitive daily newspapers in many cities, the replacement of substantive debate by sleaze in political campaigns, and episodic erosion of the principle of the separation of powers. It is estimated (by the American media expert Ben Bagditrian) that fewer than two dozen corporations control more than half of the global business in daily newspapers, magazines, television, books and movies! — Carl Sagan

The episodic, reactive, almost frantic pace of what is broadcast makes children feel and act frantic and shortens their attention spans and their patience for activities that take time and problems that don't yield immediate solutions. — Hillary Rodham Clinton

The body moves through space every day, and in architecture in cities that can be orchestrated. Not in a dictatorial fashion, but in a way of creating options, open-ended sort of personal itineraries within a building. And I see that as akin to cinematography or choreography, where episodic movement, episodic moments, occur in dance and film. — Antoine Predock

There are no true monsters, only some people [ ... ] who with regularity acted like a monster. It's still episodic. [ ... ] It never works when you leave out even a small part of the picture. — Jim Harrison

With episodic, kind of one-hour directing, they always have guest directors come in, so they don't have the same person week after week. You get a break. — Melanie Mayron

'One Hundred Years of Solitude' is a masterpiece because it is an episodic novel that has a rigorous form - an unprecedented combination. From the very beginning we know the town of Macondo will endure only a century, so there is a limit to the length of the narrative. — Edmund White

Films that rely on their cast to be funny are often episodic and feel like a series of loosely connected sketches rather than a satisfyingly structured script. — Simon Pegg

In episodic television you'll have a good guy who's on every week and that's his show! He's the regular on it, and you're not going to be "gooder" than he is; I mean, he's the guy who's got to solve your problem! So if you're playing a good guy, you have to have a problem, and he's going to solve it for you. And the only really strong dramatic part is the heavy, because the meaner and crueler and rottener you are, the better the good guy looks when he whips ya' at the end because he always is gonna whip ya! So, the best dramatic guest shot is the heavy. — Leslie Nielsen

A mere enumeration of government activity is evidence
often the sole evidence offered
of "inadequate" nongovernment institutions, whose "inability" to cope with problems "obviously" required state intervention. Government is depicted as acting not in response to its own political incentives and constraints but because it is compelled to do so by concern for the public interest: it "cannot keep its hands off" when so "much is at stake," when emergency "compels" it to supersede other decision making processes. Such a tableau simple ignores the possibility that there are political incentives for the production and distribution of "emergencies" to justify expansions of power as well as to use episodic emergencies as a reason for creating enduring government institutions. — Thomas Sowell

The thought came over me that never would one full and absolute moment, containing all the others, justify my life, that all of my instants would be provisional phases, annihilators of the past turned to face the future, and that beyond the episodic, the present, the circumstantial, we were nobody. — Jorge Luis Borges

Television has never known what to do with grief, which resists narrative: the dramas of grief are largely internal - for the bereaved, it is a chaotic, intense, episodic period, but the chaos is by and large subterranean, and easily appears static to the friendly onlooker who has absorbed the fact of loss and moved on. — Meghan O'Rourke

It takes a lot out of you to do a one-hour episodic lead of a show. I don't think actors realize that when they take the job. — Jane Krakowski

So then I started doing a lot of episodic TV, just car chases or helicopter chases or whatever. — David R. Ellis

Every person writes his or her life story similar to how a musician composes music. Author Milan Kundera noted, 'Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of great distress.' Guided by their aesthetic sense of beauty, a person transforms the intentional and fortuitous events of their life into an expressive episodic motif, which artistic creation assumes a permanent place in the composition of his or her conscious mind. — Kilroy J. Oldster

Epic stories, especially 'quest narratives' like 'The Iliad' and 'The Odyssey,' are brilliant structures for storytelling. The quest lends itself to episodic storytelling. — Simon Toyne

The war produced a dreadful desolation in the underground movement. After the arrest of the Duma faction, the Bolsheviks had no centralized party organization at all. The local committees had an episodic existence, and often had no connections with the workers' districts. — Leon Trotsky

Memory means different things to psychologists. Autobiographical memory is an interesting case because it straddles the most basic of the distinctions that scientists make between types of memory: that between semantic memory (memory for facts) and episodic memory (memory for events). Our memory for the events of our own lives involves the integration of details of what happened (episodic memory) with long-term knowledge about the facts of our lives (a kind of autobiographical semantic memory). Another important distinction is that between explicit or declarative memory (in which the contents of memory are accessible to consciousness) and implicit or non-declarative memory (which is unconscious). As we will see, this distinction is particularly important when it comes to the question of how memory is affected by trauma and extreme emotion. — Charles Fernyhough

When I made my first film, Basquiat, I think one of the criticisms was that the way I work is episodic. Later, as people started to look at the movies, they started to realize that maybe that's my style. If I could do it better or another way, I guess I would. — Julian Schnabel

We do want the freedom to move scenes from episode to episode to episode. And we do want the freedom to move writing from episode to episode to episode, because as it starts to come in and as you start to look at it as a five-hour movie just like you would in a two-hour movie, move a scene from the first 30 minutes to maybe 50 minutes in. In a streaming series, you would now be in a different episode. It's so complicated, and we're so still using the rules that were built for episodic television that we're really trying to figure it out. — Jill Soloway

I'm going to start work on developing a series for HBO, because I'm naturally given to episodic stories of considerable length. And I won't have to listen to complaints about how wordy and long my work is if you can watch it on your telephone on the subway: You can make it conform to your day as if it were a book. — Tony Kushner

The way that people are watching TV is changing. The landscape of television is changing. Movies are becoming much more insular. They're like a walled garden, where you know what you're going to see and you expect it. But in the world of TV, because it's episodic, you can explore any area because you have time to do that. You can take risks on the kinds of storytelling that you're doing. — Seth Gabel

I've consciously tried not to romanticize anything, especially not intelligence work. I've always said that I've been writing a series of episodic, naturalistic novels. The people just happen to be spies, politicians, civil servants. — Charles McCarry

Lower caloric exposure and episodic fasting can extend the life span of all animals, the longer we spend in the catabolic state, the longer we live. — Joel Fuhrman

Yes, we're trying some new stuff. Some of it might work. Some of it might not. This, of course, is the nature of episodic television. They can't all be gems. — Marc Cherry

You know, episodic TV directing is a very long and arduous job. You have very short schedules, short short shooting days, and you have to get lot of pages done. — Katey Sagal

Sex can no longer be the germ, the seed of fiction. Sex is an episode, most properly conveyed in an episodic manner, quickly, often ironically. It is a bursting forth of only one of the cells in the body of the omnipotent I, the one who hopes by concentration of tone and voice to utter the sound of reality. — Elizabeth Hardwick

I'd been making music that was intended to be like painting, in the sense that it's environmental, without the customary narrative and episodic quality that music normally has. I called this 'ambient music.' But at the same time I was trying to make visual art become more like music, in that it changed the way that music changes. — Brian Eno

It was acting, and WWE is the longest-running weekly episodic program in television. Sure, there are story lines that are better than others. — Linda McMahon

Though the theories of plate tectonics now provide us with a modus operandi, they still seem to me to be a periodic phenomenon. Nothing is world-wide, but everything is episodic. In other words, the history of anyone part of the earth, like the life of a soldier, consists of long periods of boredom and short periods of terror. — D. V. Ager

It is, as I say, easy enough to describe Holden's style of narration; but more difficult to explain how it holds our attention and gives us pleasure for the length of a whole novel. For, make no mistake, it's the style that makes the book interesting. The story it tells is episodic, inconclusive and largely made up of trivial events. Yet the language is, by normal literary criteria, very impoverished. Salinger, the invisible ventriloquist who speaks to us through Holden, must say everything he has to say about life and death and ultimate values within the limitations of a seventeen-year-old New Yorker's argot, eschewing poetic metaphors, periodic cadences, fine writing of any kind. — David Lodge

Yeah, episodic doesn't work. Your coolest character needs something big and meaningful to do. Otherwise, well, it's just narrative shit. — Don Roff

With every episodic, there's a learning curve where writers try to find the voice of the characters by way of the actors. Many details are found along the way. On 'Caprica,' although the franchise already existed, we were creating an entirely new world full of new characters. — Sasha Roiz

Life is the episodic collection of anecdotes that has some deeper meaning. — Surbhi Sareen

If you think about it, episodic filmmaking has not been something that people have really done. — Tony Gilroy

When you think of things like The Sopranos, The Wire, Damages, they are beating film on a regular basis. Most films are terrible. It's only the 2% that are good. There's things you can do on TV which you can't do on film. There is something about those episodic, serialisations that are grand and operatic. — Ricky Gervais

I think the character does tend to suit an episodic thing, because what's fun about him is that he doesn't care about anyone else, and it's very difficult for a main character - a lead character - in a movie to not care about anybody else. — Rowan Atkinson

One of my first episodic jobs was on 'Twin Peaks,' if you can imagine that - one of the most unusual series ever. — Lesli Linka Glatter

Self-reflection enables every person to alter the trajectory of their personal storyline by reviewing a series of episodic occurrences and making value judgments regarding the past. How we perceive our history colors the present, our deeds of today script the future outcome of individual persons, and the outcome of many people making conscious decisions using their cognitive processes including the ability to remember and share memories influences the direction of human development and the progress of society. — Kilroy J. Oldster

One of the tricks that you have to learn, with episodic TV, is you don't know how many years you're going to be blessed with. — Bruno Heller

The joy of a road movie is its very simple narrative nature, which is that you know you're going to go through different places and you're going to meet new people. At the same time, you have to not make it feel too obvious and too crudely episodic. — Sam Mendes

The history of life is more adequately represented by a picture of 'punctuated equilibria' than by the notion of phyletic gradualism. The history of evolution is not one of stately unfolding, but a story of homeostatic equilibria, disturbed only 'rarely' (i.e. rather often in the fullness of time) by rapid and episodic events of speciation. — Stephen Jay Gould

You know, I'm almost out of the habit of watching episodic television now. — Dick Van Dyke

Human culture, in evolutionary terms, moves from episodic, to mimetic, to mythic, to theoretic - that made all kinds of sense. To some extent, ontogeny repeats phylogeny, because children go through something like the same thing. — Robert Neelly Bellah

I was, in my day, one of the best directors of episodic TV around. — David Hemmings

One thing I'm working on is an episodic web series titled 'One Warm Night.' It's a kinda crazy, quirky series, filled with a lot of misfits, oddballs ... ninjas. — Justin Lee

One of the problems with episodic television of any color is that everything has got to be okay at the end of the episode so it can start again next week. — Peter Capaldi

"Dukes of Hazzard" or something you could, you know, that your work is going to be made up of that - episodic television shows. Not that I got many of them, but that was where I, but actually oddly enough though, they were teaching camera terminology at the same time in this acting class so I actually was able to understand what rack focus and whip pan and all that stuff meant. — Quentin Tarantino

I enjoy working with Melissa a great deal. We're always looking for projects to do together. I was happy to have her do the show, because she doesn't normally do episodic unless she's starring, and I was very happy with the results. — Bruce Boxleitner

Feature-length film comedy is harder to pull off than the episodic sitcom - it doesn't have the same factory machinery up and running, teams of writers putting familiar characters through permutations - but that doesn't explain the widening quality gap that makes movie humor look like a genetic defective. — James Wolcott

The movie Koyaanisqatsi shows non-commented time-lapse footage and focuses our attention on the very rhythm of our civilized modern life and nature. A marijuana high can do something for a user similar to what this time-lapse footage does. The enhancement of episodic memory and the acceleration of associative streams of memories can alter and enhance our recognition of patterns in our lives in various ways. If we are presented with quick associative chains of past experiences, we can see a pattern in a body of information that is usually not at once presented to our "inner eye" as such. — Sebastian Marincolo

I want to do more independent film. I'm blessed to be working on really quality episodic television, which to me actually feels like a sort of 13-hour film. — Maggie Siff

I've done episodic television and some other things that have been written by other people. — Lisa Cholodenko

I steer away from episodic TV; it burns you out. — Peter Weller

I did a good bit of episodic television directing, but directing a movie is so much more complicated. And there's so much more responsibility because the medium is very much a director's medium. Television is much more of a producer's writer's medium so a lot of the time when you're directing a television show they have a color palette on set or a visual style and dynamic that's already been predetermined and you just kind of have to follow the rules. — Jason Bateman

Ice shelves in general have episodic carvings and there can be large icebergs breaking off - I'm talking 100km or 200km long - every 10 or 20 or 50 years. — Ian Allison

I would love to be able to direct episodic television, because it's a great way to make a living, and it's something where I think I could utilize my talents as well as my ability to work fast. — Frank Whaley

Certainly, the poverty, the discrimination, the episodic unemployment could not but strike an inquiring youngster: why did these exist, and what could we do about them. — Joseph Stiglitz

Being a regular in a television series, for me - if I wanted to be a cop, I woulda went to cop school. If I wanted to be a doctor, I would've gone to medical school. You get trapped in your normal episodic television shows, basically doing the same thing. — Michael Hogan

Every Day Is for the Thief is a vivid, episodic evocation of the truism that you can't go home again; but that doesn't mean you're not free to try. A return to his native Nigeria plunges Cole's charming narrator into a tempest of chaos, contradiction, and kinship in a place both endearingly familiar and unnervingly strange. The result is a tale that engages and disturbs. — Billy Collins

We were lucky to get Sam Jackson and Jeremy Irons and John McTiernan back. Long movie and hard movie to make and difficult for me because instead of working, my biggest concern was not repeating things I had done it in the previous films. And it rang notes in my head of episodic TV. A sequel is not a new movie; it's a chapter in a movie that you have already seen. Thank god Sam was there and thank god Jeremy was there. Again, it went outside the template of that series of films but it did well and made a ton of dough and the third chapter of a lot of sequels is always the one that falls down. — Bruce Willis