Soap Opera Quotes & Sayings

I kind of went into soap opera with 'General Hospital' in the '80s. It's like theater because every day it's a new script, which really doesn't have a beginning, middle or end like a play or a movie script. So you have to be on your toes and bring it every day. And you have to be spontaneous, which is really how I like to work. — Jack Wagner

Celestials is a soapy space opera. Perhaps a spacey soap opera. — M.C. O'Neill

You're just being cryptic again. It's like soap opera sex. Lots of boring dialogue and when they finally do go to bed, everything's dark and covered by blankets. — Ragnar Tornquist

I am a person. I am not a soap opera. There is never going to be a next [tabloid] installment about my life because my own stuff is my own stuff. — Kate Winslet

I don't know, a lot of people go crazy about 'Breaking Bad,' but I don't like the soap opera aspect of it and only following one character. I like the context to all of it, all the pieces, like 'The Wire.' It's more about the state of things; it's not about the narrative of a person. — Gael Garcia Bernal

A show like Knots or any other show that can be called a soap opera does terribly in syndication because if you're a viewer and you miss a week you don't know what's going on. — William Devane

Ask most kids about details about Auschwitz or about how the American Indians were assassinated as a people and they don't know anything about it. They don't want to know anything. Most people just want their beer or their soap opera or their lullaby. — Marlon Brando

The show is escapism. If you look back to when I was in college, all the girls in the sorority houses were gathered around watching soap operas. That was the escapism, the show that was giving you something you couldn't have. Now, you go into any sorority house, there are 50 to 100 girls piled in watching The Bachelor. We are the modern-day soap opera. — Chris Harrison

Working on a soap opera is such good training for the novice actor. No rehearsal, 120 pages of dialogue per week, and one take to get the scene right. No room for error. — Dylan Bruce

I had a soap opera, and my next job was working with Kyle McLachlan on The Invisible Man. — Elisabeth Rohm

'All My Children' taught me a great work ethic; you work so hard on a soap opera! — Eva LaRue

Most of my escapades were getting my Labrador dog into the back of my car to drive to Brooklyn where I worked at Avenue M Studios shooting a soap opera and battling being a 17 to 18-year-old playing twins being afraid that I was going to get fired, because who wouldn't fire me? I had no idea what I was doing. — Anne Heche

Even the Beatles lived their lives as a soap opera. — Chris Lowe

Life is an X-rated soap opera. — John Irving

I only use my sick days for hang-overs and soap opera weddings. — Kate O'Brien

I've always enjoyed playing a little left of center characters. Otherwise I'd be on a soap opera. — Bruce Campbell

Imagine immortality, where even a marriage of fifty years would feel like a one-night stand. Imagine seeing trends and fashions blur past you. Imagine the world more crowded and desperate every century. Imagine changing religions, homes, diets, careers, until none of them have any real value.Imagine traveling the world until you're bored with every square inch. Imagine your emotions, your loves and hates and rivalries and victories, played out again and again until life is nothing more than a melo-dramatic soap opera. Until you regard the birth and death of other people with no more emotion than the wilted cut flowers you throw away. — Chuck Palahniuk

Every day we see allurements of one kind or another that tell us what we have is not enough. Someone or something is forever telling us we need to be more handsome or more wealthy, more applauded or more admired than we see ourselves as being. We are told we haven't collected enough possessions or gone to enough fun places. We are bombarded with the message that on the world's scale of things we have been weighed in the balance and found wanting. Some days it is if we have been locked in a cubicle of a great and spacious building where the only thing on the TV is a never-ending soap opera entitled Vain Imaginations. But God does not work this way. — Jeffrey R. Holland

Contemporary art is based on that an artist is supposed to go into art history in the same way as an art historian. When the artist produces something he or she relates to it with the eye of an art historian/critic. I have the feeling that when I am working it is more like working with soap opera or glamour. It is emotional and not art criticism or history of art. — Odd Nerdrum

Every problem has a gift for you in its hands as my man Richard Bach says. You can choose to see the curse or the gift. And this one choice will determine if your life is a success story or one big soap opera. — Jon Gordon

Life is like Friday on a soap opera. It gives you the illusion that everything is going to wrap up, and then the same old shit starts up on Monday. — Stephen King

Politics in a democratic society should not be treated like a baseball game, a game show or a soap opera. The times are too serious for that. — Bernie Sanders

If you're in the middle of a monumental and devastating life crisis, hang in there. It'll be over in about an hour. Two hours, tops. — Anthony Rubino Jr.

I know one thing - very few writers in Southern California get to write what they want to write. We are more or less worker ants, working for either film companies or tv companies or Internet companies. We do a lot of assigned work. Feelings hardly ever enter into it. If they do, they tend to be on a sort of soap opera level. — Larry Gelbart

Baseball is a soap opera that plays out day after day, one that a lot of elderly women watch until the characters and the plot becomes a part of their life. She got to enjoy the personal side of the players. They were her kids. The Braves were her family. — Bob Hope

My life is just like a soap opera filmed in a psychiatric ward. - T-SHIRT — Darynda Jones

When something like that happens, people want to try to find some dirt and make it more of a soap opera. But I think we both walked away with the door still open, if we want to do something together again. So yeah, I would call it a friendly break-up. — Scott Stapp

We all fictionalize ourselves in the process of creating a story out of the raw materials of our life. For some it is a soap opera, for others an epic, but, for all of us, it's an ongoing narrative that we constantly manipulate and reshape, improving (like the best anecdotes) in the retelling. This is not just true of writers. The story is one of the key ways we define and order our experiences as human beings: how we tell ourselves and others who we are.
(from the Daily Telegraph) — Neil McCormick

If work isn't rooted in comedy, people will turn from it, or they'll use it like soap opera. — Israel Horovitz

Misery loves company. This is a Hollywood soap opera, and I'm not going to be a star in another Bryant soap opera. — Karl Malone

None of them were greatly interested in the election except as a national soap opera in which the closeness of the result was more exciting than the identity of the winner. Individually, they were passionate about GP fundholding, academy schools, asylum, but none of them trusted any party to keep a promise about any of these issues. Louisa struggled to believe that she could change herself, let alone the world. — Mark Haddon

It was an emergency!" Seth blurted. "Read my lips - emergency reading - not some demented idea of fun. If I was starving, I would eat asparagus. If somebody held a gun to my head, I would watch a soap opera. And to save Fablehaven, I would read a book, okay, are you happy?"
You had best be careful, Seth," Grandma warned. "The love of reading can be contagious."
I just lost my appetite," he declared ... — Brandon Mull

Burton Cummings joining the Guess Who in January 1966 changed my life forever. It's been a rocky affiliation, no doubt. One journalist once described our relationship as the longest running soap opera in Canadian history. That may be a bit oversimplified. — Randy Bachman

My life is a soap opera. — C.E. Starkweather

Many years ago I was in another soap opera called The Newcomers which was on twice a week for three years. I really don't think I could do another stint like that again. — Jeremy Bulloch

'Friends' played in this territory of being funny, and then also just grabbing your heart. And not afraid of that. It was a comedic soap opera. Not being afraid to have an audience feel something, laugh and cry, was quite extraordinary and quite wonderful. — Warren Littlefield

It's better to be on a soap opera to renew your career and following than to be on any other medium. — Joan Fontaine

A soap opera character on the bar TV says, "You killed him, you smothered him with doughnuts!" Another character, another scene--she is sitting in a room with a man and an elderly woman--the leas character wonders if she's dead. The man says, No, you're alive," and the other woman hands her a plate of doughnuts.
A commercial comes on. A couple are on a date and the woman's voice-over articulates interior thoughts of what a wonderful guy her friend has set her up with: "He's so cute, and his IQ is higher than my bank balance . . . but she didn't tell me he has . . . Tourette's syndrome. — David Byrne

The important prediction is not the automobile, but the parking problem; not radio, but the soap opera; not the income tax, but the expense account; not the Bomb, but the nuclear stalemate — Isaac Asimov

I am a person. I am not a soap opera. — Kate Winslet

Oh for Christ sake What's the name of this soap opera, The Bored and The Addlebrained? At least half you Snow Girls have a serious boyfriend. — Lee DeBourg

Think 'Game of Thrones.' In the old days, this sort of show might be considered bad writing. It doesn't really seem to be moving toward a crisis or climax, it has no true protagonist, and it's structured less like a TV show or a movie than a soap opera. — Douglas Rushkoff

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. — S.J Perelman

In order to get the things I want, it helps me to pretend I'm a figure in a daytime drama, a schemer. Soap opera characters make emphatic pronouncements. They ball up their fists and state their goals out loud. 'I will destroy Buchanan Enterprises,' they say. 'Phoebe Wallingford will pay for what she's done to our family.' Walking home with the back half of the twelve-foot ladder, I turned to look in the direction of Hugh's loft. 'You will be mine,' I commanded. — David Sedaris

When a lack of white blood cells exposes the horizon of being, one has to make a choice. To cloister yourself away in a germ-free environment, alive but alone, or to embrace the woman you love and catch your death of cold at the marriage ceremony? What a great show. It's inner-directed script was unmatched by any other soap opera. — Benson Bruno

In the case of 'The Housewives,' I call the 'Housewives' sociology of the rich. I think it's just fun to watch. It's guilt-free gossiping that you can have. It's like the modern-day soap opera, in my mind. — Andy Cohen

If my life were still a movie, this is the part that would end up on the cutting room floor. We were all just fill-ins for a long-running soap opera. The actors changed, but the story seldom did. Certainly not the action. — Charles Martin

Why are homosexuals addicted to soap opera? Because our lives are a vivid situation. — Don DeLillo

'Star Wars' is a grand soap opera, and 'Star Trek' is about technology, they tried to explain the reality of it, as far-fetched as it might be. And that's why I've always liked the science behind the fiction. — Robert Kazinsky

It was the tale of a woman scorned, a woman locked in battle over her man, her money, her children, and her rights as a long-term wife. It was a morality tale of Biblical proportions, involving adultery and covetousness, all of it wrapped in a great big flag emblazoned with the almighty U.S. dollar - and concluding in what, on the face of it, appeared to be a most blood-curdling case of stark, premeditated murder in the first degree. Shooting them in their sleep? No soap opera writer could have concocted better. — Bella Stumbo

Was I just curious about what the agenda might be at a vampire summit? Did I want the attention of more undead members of society? Did I want to be known as a fangbanger, one of those humans who simply adored the walking dead? Did some corner of me long for a chance to be near Bill without seeking him out, still trying to make some emotional sense
of his betrayal? Or was this about Eric? Unbeknownst to myself, was I in love with the flamboyant Viking who was so handsome, so good at making love, and so political, all atthe same time?
This sounded like a promising set of problems for a soap opera season. — Charlaine Harris

The Patty Winters Shows were all repeats. Life remained a blank canvas, a cliche, a soap opera. I felt lethal, on the verge of frenzy. My nightly bloodlust overflowed into my days and I had to leave the city. My mask of sanity was a victim of impending slippage. This was bone season for me and I needed a vacation. I needed to go to the Hamptons. — Bret Easton Ellis

Commercial jazz, soap opera, pulp fiction, comic strips, the movies set the images, mannerisms, standards, and aims of the urban masses. In one way or another, everyone is equal before these cultural machines; like technology itself, the mass media are nearly universal in their incidence and appeal. They are a kind of common denominator, a kind of scheme for pre-scheduled, mass emotions. — C. Wright Mills

My mother became a casting director, and she cast me in a soap opera called 'One Life to Live.' I was, like, 8 years old, playing a kid who had hurt himself on a skateboard. I had, like, three lines. I did the lines, and everybody in the studio applauded - I was immediately hooked after that. I was like, 'This is the life for me.' — Christian Slater

You can't have a decent party for the survivors of a deadly blast without inviting the person who detonated the explosion. — Anthony Rubino Jr.

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. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

The soap opera was so long ago - the thing about soap operas, and there's something to be said for doing it, but you do a script a day. I don't want to say it's a training ground; it really isn't, but what it does teach you is discipline. — Frank Grillo

To say my friends were living a soap opera was an understatement. They almost made my dangerous relationship with Adrian look boring. — Richelle Mead

I never pictured myself as a telenovela galan - never imagined I'd be in a soap opera. — Jencarlos Canela

You could probably prove, by judicious use of logarithms and congruent triangles, that real life is a lot more like soap opera than most people will admit. — Molly Ivins

The majority of American writers today have chosen passive non-resistance to things as they are, producing sloughs of poetry about their personal angst and anomie, cascades of short stories and rivers of novels obsessed with the nuances of domestic relationships - suburban hanky-panky - chic boutique shopping mall literary soap opera. When they do speak out on matters of controversy they attack not the evils of our time but fellow writers who may insist on complaining. — Edward Abbey

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. — Marian Keyes

My grandmother was this unbelievably smart, phenomenally cool woman and [soap operas] were just always on in her house. I just realized that I live in a soap opera, and it's awesome. — Ian Somerhalder

Some soap opera, you know, real people pretending to be fake people with made-up problems being watched by real people to forget their real problems. — Chuck Palahniuk

The ordinary reality, as I perceive it, is but a huge and intricate virtual screen which operates on multiple levels. Its origins and developments extend far beyond the understanding and scope of the established functioning of the mind. Trapped in the pen of the binary system and the identification with their physical bodies, human beings eat up a fodder made up of sin, guilt and fear, as they watch the soap opera of life being repeated over and over. Yet such a mirage is so insane and unreal that attentive eyes cannot help discovering gaps all over the place. Although the operators at the projector do their best to botch it up, the absurd illusion of this misperception may reveal itself at any moment. It is like a boasting block of ice showing off its solidity as long as the temperature is below zero and yet inevitably starting to thaw and melt away in warmer weather. — Franco Santoro

I was on a soap opera before that for three years, where I was the nicest guy on earth. — Ray Liotta

I think of myself as a realistic writer, not a creator of soap opera or melodrama. — Joyce Maynard

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. — Nathan Fillion

The only way to stave off boredom, in a complex domesticated primate like humankind, is to increase one's intelligence. This is not appealing to the average primate, who instead invents emotional games (soap opera and grand opera dramatics). — Robert Anton Wilson

There's no better training than working on a soap opera because of the amount of hours, the amount of pages you do a day are unbelievable. It's the best training I had in terms of discipline. — Daniela Ruah

If you lower the standards of your life and expect to live life like the people in a movie or a soap opera, you are not living God's will for your life. — Sue Detweiler

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. — Dan Stevens

She remained silent. There was nothing left to say. He'd said it all the night before. He had to end it. He could never leave his wife. And, in fact, she had known this. Although she loved him - and truly she did - he wasn't hers. He belonged to his wife. She'd earned him. It didn't matter that he was her first love or that she was his passion. It didn't matter that they had loved one another for more than half their lives. It didn't matter that he had married his wife on the rebound. It didn't matter that he didn't love the woman. It didn't even matter that they had turned into some soap-opera cliche. He was married to someone else and that meant that she was leftovers and destined to remain on the periphery in the shadow of another woman's marriage. But no more. She was well and truly sick of it. — Anna McPartlin

Are you implying that our relationship is like a Spanish soap opera?"
"I'm not implying. I'm saying it. — Ilona Andrews

I was the first movie star to plunge into night-time soap opera. — Dorothy Malone

To be let go from a soap opera is the most embarrassing confidence basher in the world. It's like, 'Oh, if I'm not good enough for that, I'm not good enough for anything.' — Cam Gigandet

I looked at the hit man who was watching us closely and told him, "Don't think in the crazy-ass soap opera that is my life that I've forgotten about you. Or you," I said to Rosie. — Kristen Ashley

As Tristan left the darkroom he heard Lacey's soap opera voice. "And so our two heroes part," she said, "blinded by love, neither of them listening to the wise and beautiful Lacey" - she hummed a little - "who, by the way, is getting a broken heart of her own. But who cares about Lacey?" she asked sadly. "Who cares about Lacey? — Elizabeth Chandler

I am a living soap opera. — Virginia Graham

Soaps taught me the fundamentals of the game. You know, how to show up, hit your mark, how to be on time. That soap opera world is a microcosm of the entertainment culture. — Michael Weatherly

This is, by far, the craziest shit I have ever seen," Kenji says. "I really never would've believed it. Not in a million years."
"It's like a soap opera ... But with worse acting."
"I think it's kind of sweet ... — Tahereh Mafi

You would be amazed at the pompadour that I was rocking in the first job I had on the soap opera called 'Loving,' my first contract job. — Michael Weatherly

I went out to testify in front of the Ways and Means Committee out in Congress on open free trade to China. Now, this would affect literally every Minnesotan in some way or another, if not all Americans in some way or another ... The local media sent no one out to cover my testimony ... Well, then a couple weeks later, I go out to do The Young and the Restless, the TV soap opera, and everybody sends crews. We had to move them into a room in three different sections or three shifts of them because there was so much media covering that. — Jesse Ventura

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. — Jennifer Aniston

They're getting me involved in intrigue again, and I think it follows a classic formula in a soap opera. — Michael Zaslow

Because we're in a small town and somewhat isolated from the fast lane of high tech, we've been able to grow and concentrate on our work instead of being distracted by the competition and getting caught up in the soap opera of Silicon Valley. — Jack Dangermond

That small circle of earth became a second home to both of us. Gardening boring? Never! It has surprise, tragedy, startling developments - a soap opera growing out of the ground. I'd forgotten that tremolo of expectation produced by a tiny forest of sprouts. — Paul Fleischman

Shameless self-publicity works, of course: living your life as a soap opera. — Chris Lowe

I think one of the great strengths of 'The Flash' is just how close everyone is on the show. They tend not to have these raging conflicts, like what we keep giving everybody on 'Arrow.' That show is more of a soap opera, and I don't say that derogatorily. — Andrew Kreisberg

The catalogue of miseries seems to cry out for commercial spots and a station break: the stuff of noonday soap opera. — Stefan Kanfer

I watch soap operas. I bake brownies. Normalcy is coursing through my veins. — Parker Posey

My mom was on a soap opera for 40 years, so I know about love and romance. — Corbin Bernsen

Soap opera wouldn't be my first choice, but at this point in my life, I would consider a soap. It would allow me to act and still do other things with my life. — Joe Lando

Arthuriana has become a genre in itself, more like TV soap opera where people think they know the characters. All that's fair enough, but it does remove the mythic power of the feminine and masculine principles. So I prefer it in its original form, even if you have to wade through Mallory's 'Le Morte d'Arthur'
people smashing people for pages and pages! It still has the resonances of myth about it, which makes it work for me. I don't want to know if Mordred led an unhappy childhood or not. — Michael Moorcock

I don't like reality shows and have never watched them, but I'm addicted to 'Real Housewives' because it's authentic old-time soap opera reborn! — Camille Paglia

Soap opera rappers, all these niggas sound like 'All My Children'. — Drake

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!' — Teddy Sears

It's much easier for me to be silly than it is to be serious on soap opera. — Doug Davidson

I started a novel in the back of a notebook, and it was great because it looked like I was taking notes. And I just, I kept it up, it was sort of fantasy, it was part soap opera. It was utterly dreadful, but that's how I got hooked. — Jacqueline Carey

Sessioning is simply the process of showing your player an exit for a play session. It might seem counterintuitive, but it appears in a great number of successful F2P titles. It is, to reuse the soap opera analogy, a cliffhanger. — Will Luton