Television Show Quotes & Sayings

I love television; I specifically love having a dumb character on a TV show. — Bill Lawrence

It was apparent...that, all over America, thousands of people threw down a book or got up from a television show and said, 'I can write better than that!' It was amazing how many of them were wrong. — Donald E. Westlake

Shooting a television show can be very difficult and at times can really wear on you. If you keep reminding yourself that it is a job and you show up together as a team and as a whole, you can prevail. — David Boreanaz

'Idol' was groundbreaking television. I am very fortunate to have won the show at the time. 'Idol' changed my life, and I am thankful. — Taylor Hicks

You can say that all you want, but even in the little time that I've been in this industry, I've learned that it isn't exactly what you expect, so you've got to have a level head. I thought people would dig it. I thought people would enjoy it. It's AMC. I thought people would be fans. But, I did not think we would be the best new show on television. — Steven Yeun

If I find the right character, I don't care if it's a film, a television show or a play, I'm gonna do it. Everybody crosses over and it's just one big pool of stuff now. — Jaimie Alexander

I actually think the band doesn't need the television show. And I actually think the television show holds it back. No one at radio wants to play a band that's on a television show. — Kendall Schmidt

Well, life isn't cheap. It's the greatest mystery of any millennium, and television needs to do all it can to broadcast that ... to show and tell what the good in life is all about.
But how do we make goodness attractive? By doing whatever we can do to bring courage to those whose lives move near our own
by treating our 'neighbor' at least as well as we treat ourselves and allowing that to inform everything that we produce.
Who in your life has been such a servant to you? Who has helped you love the good that grows within you? Let's just take ten seconds to think of some of those people who have loved us and wanted what was best for us in life, those who have encouraged us to become who we are tonight - just ten seconds of silence.
No matter where they are, either here or in heaven, imagine how pleased those people must be to know that you thought of them right now. — Fred Rogers

You know what, I'd done an interview show when I was like 16 or 17. One of my first jobs. I did interviews for this television show in Toronto. — Keanu Reeves

I discovered television is a great way to deal with the chaos of new motherhood. I would put the babies to bed and get lost in a trashy reality show. — Tamra Davis

I think 'Lost' was really a pioneer in the use of the kind of connection between a television show and the Internet, and the Internet really gave fans an opportunity to create a community around the show. That was something that wasn't really planned; it just sort of grew up in the wake of the show. — Carlton Cuse

I have been to the theater more since I have lived in New York than I ever really did in London working on a television show. — Richard C. Armitage

I'm a worker. I like to work and I like to provide work for other people. I like to put people on my show who normally would never have a chance at being on television. — Chelsea Handler

While all the other kids were out playing ball and stuff, I used to stay in my room and imagine that there was a camera in the wall. And I used to really believe that I was putting on a television show and that it was going out to somewhere in the world. — Andy Kaufman

This whole thing about reality television to me is really indicative of America saying we're not satisfied just watching television, we want to star in our own TV shows. We want you to discover us and put us in your own TV show, and we want television to be about us, finally. — Steven Spielberg

I didn't have parents who were, you know, racing to get a reality television show, you know? Or looking to benefit in some way from their daughter's fame. — Molly Ringwald

So by all means let's have a television show quick and long, even if the commercial has to be delivered by a man in a white coat with a stethoscope hanging around his neck, selling ergot pills. After all the public is entitled to what it wants, isn't it? The Romans knew that and even they lasted four hundred years after they started to putrefy. — Raymond Chandler

When you do a film, when you do a television show, eventually someone comes along and will say to you, 'Don't say that because, one, you will offend someone, or, two, no one will get that. Someone's going to be confused by that, not get the reference and feel abandoned, and then they will get angry at the entertainment.' — Douglas Carter Beane

I hand over a lot of things when I'm home. Mom tells me she doesn't like my shirt I want to buy, and I hand it over. Not the shirt itself, but my wish for that shirt. I want to watch one television show and she wants to watch another one -I hand that over too. It's easier that way. I even hand over my toenails when she asks. But I think sometimes you need to put a thing in a box -even if the box is inside your head -and store it away for yourself. — Gin Phillips

It is genuinely shocking to me that I'm on a television show. — Chris Hayes

It was the economic benefit,You make a comfortable living in public service and you get a fairly comfortable retirement, if you watch your pennies and you're not extravagant. But in television, if a show goes, you make a substantial amount of money. So, economically it just didn't make sense for me not to. — Mills Lane

I use every opportunity, whether on my radio show or on television, to break stereotypes. — Ryan Seacrest

I think what we need is a more welcoming mode from the people who put on a hundred million country-western shows on television. How about a monthly jazz show? — Sonny Rollins

The best show on television is Red Sox baseball. Everything else sucks. — Stephen King

But actually my dad is a very talented director and not just his use of shots and camera, but he's very good with actors and he knows acting well. It's great to see him do that and be really good at it and he's been doing it for a while and he certainly knows how to make movies, and little movies I guess for a television show, and he's going to come back in November to direct a second episode, which I'm really excited about. — Emily Deschanel

I am kind of a private person, so I don't miss that part of show business at all. Looking back on my career in television and making a movie like 'The Sound of Music' from an adult point of view, it actually seems kind of unreal. I was involved in shows that people grew up with - that hold memories for them - and it's a cool feeling. — Angela Cartwright

A lot of people in television who've had successful shows claim the 'Roseanne' show as their starting place, and I'm really proud of that. — Roseanne Barr

The smartest kid Justin ever met, back in kindergarten, had told him to pretend his parents were characters in a television sitcom. 'Pretend there's a frame around 'em like the Tube, pretend they're a show you're watching. You can go into it if you want, or you can just watch and not go into it. — Thomas Pynchon

I did 30 Minute Meals for five years on local television, and I earned nothing the first two years. Then I earned $50 a segment. I spent more than that on gas and groceries, but I really enjoyed making the show and I loved going to a viewer's house each week. I knew I enjoyed it, so I stuck with it even though it cost me. — Rachael Ray

I think that every show on television has its place. I think Married With Children or, I don't know, The Nanny ... some people want to go home, turn on the TV and be able to iron their clothes or grab a sandwich. Come out and catch a joke and not have to follow the story. — Peter Krause

I'm not surprised 'The Avengers' has such enduring popularity, because it was a groundbreaking series that changed television. It was the first show that put its leading man and leading lady on an equal footing and showed a woman fighting and kicking and throwing men around. That was a radical departure in its time. — Patrick Macnee

Even in the '70s and '80s, the television show Happy Days was aware of the irony of "cool." The cool character on Happy Days was "the Fonz," and he was ridiculous. His office was in a men's bathroom. That's not only not cool, that's not even sanitary. — Jim Gaffigan

It's every actor's dream to work in a hit show on Broadway and also shoot a television show. — Aaron Tveit

'Beverly Hills Cop' opened up a whole world. I got the television show and movies, and I would go sign autographs for one hour and get paid $25,000. — Bronson Pinchot

I was always singing and dancing for my mother when I wasn't glued to the television watching I Love Lucy or the Carol Burnett Show. — Debra Messing

[The modern age] knows nothing about isolation and nothing about silence. In our quietest and loneliest hour the automatic ice-maker in the refrigerator will cluck and drop an ice cube, the automatic dishwasher will sigh through its changes, a plane will drone over, the nearest freeway will vibrate the air. Red and white lights will pass in the sky, lights will shine along highways and glance off windows. There is always a radio that can be turned to some all-night station, or a television set to turn artificial moonlight into the flickering images of the late show. We can put on a turntable whatever consolation we most respond to, Mozart or Copland or the Grateful Dead. — Wallace Stegner

I have a season pass to several of the VH1 shows, like 'Rock of Love' and Flavor Flav's show. It's kind of embarrassing because it's completely ignorant television - it's all totally fake and garbage - but I still love it. — Megan Fox

It's interesting: I went 25 years without watching a single television show. I was one of those people, because I was so inside how a television show was made, if I would turn on somebody else's show, I would sit there and analyze it, like, 'Oh, so they had four hours in this location and had to get out and the number of set-ups, etc.' — Marshall Herskovitz

Glen Cove. [Referring to Glenn Close on a movie review television show] — Yogi Berra

I got one letter at the very beginning, like, in the first season, saying - from a woman who was very religious, very Christian, saying how wrong she thought the show was, but she thinks it's the funniest show on television. — Sean Hayes

I started writing prose before I started writing television. Then 'Breaking Bad' came around, and to me, writing 'Breaking Bad' is like writing a novel each season. So it's been very creatively satisfying writing for the show. — George Mastras

With the marketing pressures driving the book world today, it's much easier to get the author of a memoir on a television show than a serious novelist. — David Halberstam

I lost my innocence with Johnny Cash. I used to watch the 'Johnny Cash Show' on television in Wangaratta when I was about 9 or 10 years old. At that stage I had really no idea about rock n' roll. I watched him, and from that point I saw that music could be an evil thing - a beautiful, evil thing. — Nick Cave

But it is not time constraints alone that produce such fragmented and discontinuous language. When a television show is in process, it is very nearly impermissible to say, "Let me think about that" or "I don't know" or "What do you mean when you say ... ?" or "From what sources does your information come?" This type of discourse not only slows down the tempo of the show but creates the impression of uncertainty or lack of finish. It tends to reveal people in the act of thinking, which is as disconcerting and boring on television as it is on a Las Vegas stage. Thinking does not play well on television, a fact that television directors discovered long ago. There is not much to see in it. It is, in a phrase, not a performing art. But television demands a performing art. — Neil Postman

I loved 'The West Wing'; it's my favourite-ever television show. — Rupert Evans

I pitched my last children's show presentation in the mid 1980's. The era of locally produced children's shows was over and the networks were not and are not interested in children's television. — William Jackson

Notice how every science fiction movie or television show starts with a shot of the location where the story is about to occur. Movies that take place in outer space always start with a shot of stars and a starship. Movies that take place on another world always start with a shot of that planet. This is to let you know where you are. Novels and stories start the same way. You have to give the reader a sense of where he is and what's happening as quickly as possible. You don't want to start the story by confusing the reader. — David Gerrold

This is, in fact, the biggest show that Marvel television has ever taken on, in the animation world. We had a real challenge that was posed to us, and that was this little, tiny art-house movie that came out last year, that I don't know if you saw, called Marvel's The Avengers, written and directed by our friend Joss Whedon, and it really set the template. — Jeph Loeb

'Modern Family' is one of my favorite shows on television right now. I just think that show is so brilliantly done. It's so fun, I love it. Eric Stonestreet I could just sit and watch forever. They're all great. That would be on the top of my list. — Joanna Garcia

There's a television show, 'Hoarders,' where people have those homes filled with stuff. Emotionally, in our minds, we get so filled with resentments where we've got a story about absolutely everything. — Chuck Palahniuk

'South Park' is so hilarious ... I remember when it first came out: that show changed television forever. — Blake Anderson

It would be great to do another television show that was a multi-camera because the hours are so wonderful and you can be a good mom at the same time. The problem is, there aren't a lot of multi-camera shows that I personally like. My aesthetic is more geared toward single-camera shows. — Kaitlin Olson

Which meant it was time for the centerpiece of the celebration, the reason they were all gathered on Saturday, the weekly episode of what, as far as many of the Davidsons including Jody were concerned was the greatest television show ever made. Hee Haw. While Roy and Buck sang the opening song, everyone would bicker and talk back and forth, what was better about the show, the music or the humor, what have you, the natural result of 40 people crowded around one rabbit eared television set. But once Hee Haw started, the talking was over. After that, it was all about the love. And so was everything before, really. — Brian Holers

Unless you're a directing producer of a television show, for the most part, the director comes in one week to direct and episode, and then leaves. I'd much rather produce television and occasionally direct an episode of a show I'm producing, then just come in as an outside director. — Eric Balfour

The television business is based on managed dissatisfaction. You're watching a great television show you're really wrapped up in? You might get 50 minutes of watching a week and then 18,000 minutes of waiting until the next episode comes along. — Ted Sarandos

Every story you've read, play you've seen, every movie and every television show, every poem you've heard and every song...

All came to live because someone had a story in their mind and had enough courage to put it on paper and share it with the world.

Be brave. Tell your story.

-DS. — D.S. Kenn

When a television show like 'Scandal' becomes the biggest show in recent history, suddenly advertisers and networks want to jump on that. And what it's showing is that people want to see diversity. — Jussie Smollett

All my interesting stories are from before I was on television. Nothing interesting has happened to me since then. Maybe it's because the most interesting thing in my life is the show and that's on telly. — Graham Norton

It's very rare to have rehearsal time on a television show: You get scripts, you show up, and you do it. — Tony Hale

It's a world creation show [Shadowhunters], so we've gotta work hard in the physical production capacity with the visual effects, the sets and everything. It's not just the real world with two people chatting in a diner. That's tough on a television budget. — Joseph McGinty Nichol

'The Young and the Restless' is my favorite television show. — Jesse Ventura

Of course you have a duty to show the disfigurations of society as well as its more agreeable aspects. But if TV in the western world uses its freedom continually to show all that is worst in our society, while the centrally controlled television of the Communist world and the dictatorships show only what is judged advantageous to them and suppress everything else, how are the uncommitted to judge between us? How can they fail to misjudge if they view matters only through a distorted mirror? — Margaret Thatcher

Every time I see this one particular movie star on a magazine, I can't help but feel terribly sorry for her because nobody respects her at all, and yet they keep interviewing her. And the interviews are all the same thing.
They start with what food they are eating in some restaurant. "As _ gingerly munched her Chinese Chicken Salad, she spoke of love." And all the covers say the same thing: "_ gets to the bottom of stardom, love, and his/her hit new movie/television show/album."
I think it's nice for stars to do interviews to make us think they are just like us, but to tell you the truth, I get the feeling that it's all a big lie. The problem is I don't know who's lying. — Stephen Chbosky

If the picture is not an artistic picture, it's show, like television. Television series are very funny, but it's a collective production. An industrial art. A car is not made by a person, it's made by a group of creators, only to go to the market to buy your cigarettes. That is a car - they are not a big art, they are a little art. — Alejandro Jodorowsky

Year Two is a critical year for any television show. — Josh Schwartz

Once you buy into a television show, there doesn't have to be resolution from week to week. You can develop characters and storylines and react to the audience, so you get more of a serialized version of storytelling where you can go much deeper into each character. It's more like a novel. — Jon Favreau

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

I'm inordinately proud of Smash, on so many levels. The complexity of producing that show, every week, is just incredible. As a television producer and as a Broadway producer, which I once was, I am in awe of what we can do on that show, every week. — Robert Greenblatt

I am a street performer as much as I am a stage performer. Yes, I have a television show, but every trick, every 'Mindfreak' you see, I can do live. — Criss Angel

Fake is not a word I like to use because there's nothing fake about what I do. It's a show, it's a predetermined outcome; we're putting on a television drama, action, comedy, whatever you want to call it - but it's not fake. Fake would be if I was just about to take a body slam, and my stuntman did it. Fake would be if I was going to take a chair shot to the head, and the chair was made of rubber. I'll tell the world that it's a show, but I hate the word fake. It's such an unfair term to us. — Chris Jericho

CBS's halftime show during the 2004 Super Bowl was a new low for television. — Mike Rogers

During Christmas time, on German television they show films with three or four episodes, and I quite like the feeling of waiting for the next episode. — Volker Bertelmann

The first dumb idea was to do it at all - to take 'Fargo,' this beloved classic, and turn it into a television show. The second dumb idea, when you do it and it works, was to throw everything out and start again. — Noah Hawley

You watch the country-music awards that they show on the television, and you see country music has reached about 1985. It's all huge processed drum sounds and chiming chorus guitars and programmed synths bobbling along in the background. — Andy Partridge

You have to be rather straightforward with your clients. You can't tell the parties only nice things. This is not an entertainment show; it's not reality television either. — Martti Ahtisaari

It's [Into the Badlands] something that's very, very different and I think that's why it divided critics initially because they didn't understand it or get it. They didn't understand or have a knowledge of what we were trying to do. Bringing in the Asian martial arts aesthetic to American television. For us, these are the people who will make the show a hit or a failure in future seasons. So it's for us to respect them and interact and see what they have to say. — Miles Millar

The fact 'Twin Peaks' had a life at all took most of us in the cast by surprise. We thought it would be too unusual for network television. The original intention was that it would be a two-hour movie. If the network didn't want to pick it up as a series, it could just show that. But ABC took a chance. — Kyle MacLachlan

If my life can inspire people, then a television show where guests talk about their challenges and what makes them unique would work. — Anupam Kher

Worship isn't destructive, Martin. I know that.
I don't. I only know it's the core of his life. What else has he got? He can hardly read. He knows no physics or engineering to make to world real for him. No paintings to show him how others have enjoyed it. No music except television jingles. No history except tales from a desperate mother. No friends. Not one kid to give him a joke, or make him know himself more moderately. He's a modern citizen for whom society doesn't exist. — Peter Shaffer

So much of television is incredibly predictable. You watch the first five minutes and you know where it's going to go. If you can just create an element of surprise in both the storytelling and tone of a show, you're going to be way ahead of the pack. — David Nevins

Every song that has been a hit for me has been honest and truthful. I have to believe that same formula will work on this (television) show. It has to be believable and honest. — Reba McEntire

I like to stay home and watch television. The Game Show channel, mostly. — Harry Dean Stanton

It's important to me that I look good on television because, let's face it, I'm single, and you want somebody to watch the show and fall in love with you. — Camryn Manheim

I was going to dine at the television company's expense with one of the most beautiful women in show business and some television producer with an inferiority complex. In my experience, there's always a price. — V.T. Davy

Von Schnitzler's job was to show extracts from western television broadcast into the GDR - anything from news items to game shows to 'Dallas' - and rip it to shreds. 'That man radiated so much nastiness he simply wasn't credible. You'd come away feeling sullied, as if you'd spent half an hour atrociously badmouthing someone. — Anna Funder

I can say that. I have a television show. — Daniel Tosh

On Egyptian television during a 2010 talk show, a Muslim cleric, Sa'd Arafat, reviewed the rules for beating one's wife. He began by saying, "Allah honored wives by installing the punishment of beating."21 Beating, he explained, was a legitimate punishment if a husband did not receive sexual satisfaction from his wife. But he added: "There is a beating etiquette." Beatings must avoid the face because they should not make a wife ugly. They must be done at chest level. He recommended using a short rod. — Ayaan Hirsi Ali

I ... briefly wondered why I kept running into repeat uses of various locations around town. This wasn't the first time I'd dealt with the bad guys choosing to reuse a location different bad guys had used before them. Maybe there was a Villainous Time-share Association. Maybe my life was actually a basic-cable television show, and they couldn't afford to spend money on new sets all the time. — Jim Butcher

My grandma has never been impressed with the TV show [Desperate Housewives]. She was so angry because I was on television kissing a boy naked; she's very traditional. She said: "If I ever see you kissing that boy again ... ". — Eva Longoria

The scripts for Marco Polo are absolutely, positively fantastic. The challenge of making that show in China has proved to be as formidable as we feared. It's not like making a movie in China where, once you load up and you leave, you're gone. We have to be able to come back and capture something that's going to feel like a major feature film, on a television budget, and do it, hopefully season after season, so we are taking more time than the producers thought. — Chris Albrecht

I should go so far as to say that embedded in the surrealistic frame of a television news show is a theory of anticommunication, featuring a type of discourse that abandons logic, reason, sequence and rules of contradiction. In aesthetics, I believe the name given to this theory is Dadaism; in philosophy, nihilism; in psychiatry, schizophrenia. In the parlance of the theater, it is known as vaudeville. — Neil Postman

I don't really watch all that much television, I have to say, because I'm so intimidated by how many channels there are. I really cannot find my way back to anything. But I'm compulsively addicted to '24.' I love that show. — Kate Beckinsale

But when I see a story on welfare on television, they only show black people. — Charles Barkley

There is a somewhat-surprising, somewhat totally predictable paucity of struggle in entertainment television. I do like being a part of a show featuring a family from a struggling socioeconomic strata. — Lucas Neff

I used to sneak up to the 8th floor and watch Eddie Murphy and Joe Piscopo rehearsing 'Saturday Night Live' and could only wonder if I would ever have the chance to be funny. It took me five years to go up the two stories, but it is such a sense of fulfillment to be able to show what I can do on national television. — Dana Carvey

It never occurred to me that I'd be on a television show or in feature films but when those came into play my dreams changed along the way. — Camryn Manheim

That's the great thing about a series: you're driving to work, and you have an idea for a story for your characters, and you can go into work, and it's gonna be a television show. I mean that's what's great about the job. — James L. Brooks

What attracted me to it, beyond it being really intelligent, was that it was sadly something that would be unique on television. Anchoring this political show is this vital, dynamic, complex, thriving marriage. These people are passionately and fiercely committed to making it work out. — Tim Daly

America is ceasing to be a nation, and turning into a giant television show. And this Republican race is our first and most brutal casting call. — Matt Taibbi

None of those jobs were high-profile, but once I was on ET, people then began to associate me with that show. So, that is the thing that many people know me for. When in effect, that was the end of my television career. — John Tesh