Downton Abbey is the most popular drama in the history of public television. When the whole of the TV universe is fragmenting, that isn't just impressive. It's almost impossible. But here we are. — David Bianculli
Even though shows like NYPD Blue are soaps in my opinion, but they're individualized to an extent that you can still follow what's going on if you miss a week. — William Devane
TV writing is for people who hate being alone more than they hate writing. — Matthew Weiner
Drama is life with the dull parts cut out of it. — Alfred Hitchcock
One of the greatest things drama can do, at it's best, is to redefine the words we use every day such as love, home, family, loyalty and envy. Tragedy need not be a downer. — Ben Kingsley
Television allowed me to kick the Hollywood habit of typing an actor in certain roles. — Harry Morgan
It's exciting that you've got an entire season to experience 24 hours of highly dramatically charged human experience. It allows for the close inspection of minutiae in behaviour. — Xander Berkeley
Will TV kill the theater? If the programs I have seen, save for "Kukla, Fran and Ollie," the ball games and the fights, are any criterion, the theater need not wake up in a cold sweat. — Tallulah Bankhead
Drama is exposure; it is confrontation; it is contradiction and it leads to analysis, construction, recognition and eventually to an awakening of understanding. — Peter Brook
The film drama is the opium of the people…down with bourgeois fairy-tale scenarios…long live life as it is! — Dziga Vertov
It's hard enough to write a good drama, it's much harder to write a good comedy, and it's hardest of all to write a drama with comedy. Which is what life is. — Jack Lemmon
Television makes so much at its worst that it can't afford to do its best. — Fred W. Friendly
Television is where you watch people in your living room that you would not want near your house. — Groucho Marx
Television has lifted the manufacture of banality out of the sphere of handicraft and placed it in that of a major industry. — Nathalie Sarraute
Short Television Drama Quotes
In nighttime series, the actor gets billing up front on every episode. — Michael Zaslow
Life doesn't imitate art, it imitates bad television. — Woody Allen
Television is for appearing on, not looking at. — Noel Coward
So then I started doing a lot of episodic TV, just car chases or helicopter chases or whatever. — David R. Ellis
I like melodrama because it is situated just at the meeting point between life and theater. — Luchino Visconti
Television has proved that people will look at anything rather than each other. — Ann Landers
Television has made dictatorship impossible but democracy unbearable. — Shimon Peres
Movies will make you famous; Television will make you rich; But theatre will make you good. — Terrence Mann
We want to seam in reality as we are on TV. — James Murray
Television Drama Image Quotes
A true friend is the only person who never gets tired of listening to your own pointless dramas over and over again.
Television Quotes
Shortly, the public will be unable to reason or think for themselves. They'll only be able to parrot the information they've been given on the previous night's news. — Zbigniew Brzezinski
You will not be able to stay home, brother./You will not be able to plug in, turn on and cop out./You will not be able to lose yourself on skag and skip,/Skip out for beer during commercials,/Because the revolution will not be televised. — Gil Scott-Heron
Many of our own people here in this country do not ask about computers, telephones and television sets. They ask - when will we get a road to our village. — Thabo Mbeki
A true friend is the only person who never gets tired of listening to your own pointless dramas over and over again.
There's nothing on it worthwhile, and we're not going to watch it in this household, and I don't want it in your intellectual diet. — Philo Farnsworth
You didn't see me on television, you didn't see news stories about me. The kind of role that I tried to play was to pick up pieces or put together pieces out of which I hoped organization might come. My theory is, strong people don't need strong leaders. — Ella Baker
The television, that insidious beast, that Medusa which freezes a billion people to stone every night, staring fixedly, that Siren which called and sang and promised so much and gave, after all, so little. — Ray Bradbury
People say that it was degrading for an Olympic champion to run against a horse, but what was I supposed to do? I had four gold medals, but you can't eat four gold medals. There was no television, no big advertising, no endorsements then. Not for a black man, anyway. — Jesse Owens
It is not heroin or cocaine that makes one an addict, it is the need to escape from a harsh reality. There are more television addicts, more baseball and football addicts, more movie addicts, and certainly more alcohol addicts in this country than there are narcotics addicts. — Shirley Chisholm
Perhaps these ancient observatories like Stonehenge perennially impress modern people because modern people have no idea how the Sun, Moon, or stars move. We are too busy watching evening television to care what's going on in the sky. — Neil deGrasse Tyson
I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book. — Groucho Marx
Good Drama Quotes
Michigan is two radically different places - the North and the South which makes for good drama and contrast. — Jim Harrison
Some of Eminem's rap songs kind of have the teenage love songs like the fifties love songs. It's kind of like domestic drama set to music. He is really good storyteller. — Bruce Dickinson
I want to do more drama. Comedy is the path of least resistance for my company. People know we can do them. People know they get a good response. People want to make them. Who am I to push up against that? — Ice Cube
Every day of the year is a good day to think more deeply about Good Friday, for Good Friday is the drama of the love by which our every day is sustained. — Richard John Neuhaus
I think 'Breaking Bad' is brilliant. Good drama in the U.S. is also so funny and blurs the line between light and dark. — Arthur Darvill
An actor who is good at comedy can also be very good at drama, but not necessarily vice versa. — Desi Arnaz
As people, [my parents were] very colorful, very talkative, passionate, they really loved each other. But that also meant heated, it meant there was a lot of drama in the house. Which is good for a filmmaker, I think. — David O. Russell
There's an ecstasy about doing something really good on film: the composition of a shot, the drama within the shot, the texture... It's palpable. — William Shatner
There are lots of people in the world who do have the advantage of going to a good drama school and just decide that they want to be actors. There's nothing wrong with an untrained actor; they have to get their training somehow, they have to learn. — Erika Slezak
Americans don’t want drama, especially good drama, they just want their boredom killed. — Paddy Chayefsky
Television News Quotes
One of the basic troubles with radio and television news is that both instruments have grown up as an incompatible combination of show business, advertising and news. Each of the three is a rather bizarre and demanding profession. And when you get all three under one roof, the dust never settles. — Sayings
The news media's silence, particularly television news, is reprehensible. If we knew as much about Darfur as we do about Michael Jackson, we might be able to stop these things from continuing. — Nicholas D. Kristof
Fox News is hated because they're elitists, and the worst winners television's ever seen. — Keith Olbermann
Our brains are no longer conditioned for reverence and awe. We cannot imagine a Second Coming that would not be cut down to size by the televised evening news, or a Last Judgment not subject to pages of holier-than-thou second-guessing in The New York Review of Books. — John Updike
Commercials are not the only junk food in the speech market - indeed, when compared to shallow news reporting, vacuous television shows, or political doublespeak, commercials are not even the most harmful to mental health. — Rodney A. Smolla
That crossover of whether it's entertainment or news is the biggest crock of b.s. in television today, because it's all entertainment. — Vince McMahon
Television news is a delicate balance of serving public good and private gain. — Jessica Savitch
I remember the mid-50s well. It was when my life changed, and I left acting to become one of the first female television news reporters in the UK. — Lynne Reid Banks
You know, when people talk about filmmaking and the techniques of filmmaking, we use them all the time in network television news in order to make our stories simpler, tighter and more understandable to the general public. — Lowell Bergman
Television news is now entertainment, and the stories are being written by the people that have a special interest in them. — James Taylor
Family Drama Quotes
A man needs a friend to share goals with, a woman to share his heart with, and a nation to serve with all of his heart. That's the best life one can live. — Yi Sun-sin
Gratitude and fear can't stand the sight of each other. — Robin Sharma
I hope that's how it is on every set - or that Teen Wolf goes on forever! Our cast is so honest with each other. There's no drama. There's no judgment. We just click. It's like a family. — Crystal Reed
With family dramas, it's hard to keep those stories alive. — Emily VanCamp
We don't have to have blood relations in order to be brothers and sisters. Flesh and blood, those are just things that we're made of. In a real family, what matters is our hearts. We care, show concern and love. Anyone can be family too. — Kim Da-hyun
Other than hitting the ball...there's nothing else I have ever done or know how to do. How to live on the outside, how to earn a living, how to take of my family, I'm a stupid idiot who doesn't know how to do any of that. Therefore...Please let me play baseball. — Kim Young-kwang
People tend to think of Brisbane as a sleepy, sub-topical place. I don't know. It's like Baltimore or something. I don't know. You would hear the family dramas going on behind closed doors. — Geoffrey Rush
So much of great American drama has been about a certain kind of dysfunctional family, and maybe my interests are in the kind of strange dysfunction that exists even among deeply functional families. — Stephen Karam
I would probably say I identified more with drama. I'm a really emotional, sensitive person. I'm family-minded and I'm the youngest of four kids. I have nine stepbrothers and sisters. And I love drama. I really do. — Courteney Cox
Nothing like watching your relatives fight, I always say. — Rick Riordan
Tv Series Quotes
I've been around since I was 19, I won the Oscar when I was 21, I've had a couple of TV series. I've continued to work despite the predictions of some naysayers. — Marlee Matlin
We've always dreamt of doing TV and movies and we shot two pilots for TV networks, but neither one went to series. — James Murray
I'm a workaholic. I love every movie I've been in, even the bad ones, every TV series, every play, because I love to work. It's what keeps me going. — Karl Malden
I becan acting when River was doing this TV series and they needed two kids for the show, so they got me and my little sister, Summer, to do it. After that I did some really weird guest spots with orangutans and stuff. — Joaquin Phoenix
Did you seriously just stamp your foot? I thought girls only did that on TV. — Stephenie Meyer
I wanted to do Buddy Faro as a small budget movie. They said no. So I wanted to do it as a series of recurring TV movies, and they said no. So I agreed to do it as a series. — Dennis Farina
I taped my first series for PBS in 1982 at WJCT-TV in Jacksonville, Florida. The show, called 'Everyday Cooking with Jacques Pepin,' was about saving time and money in the kitchen - and it was a celebration of simple and unpretentious food. — Jacques Pepin
TV by and large has become a dime-store business so far as creativity and talent are concerned. The half-hour and sixty-minute series rattle off the production lines like cans of beans, with an occasional dab of ham inside. — Hedda Hopper
I will never do another TV series. It couldn't top I Love Lucy, and I'd be foolish to try. In this business, you have to know when to get off. — Lucille Ball
And people are always saying: 'Well, you go to Hollywood and you get yourself a film career or a TV series, and then you can do anything you want. Because then you've got the clout.' That had always sounded like a lot of hooey to me, but now I think it's true, unfortunately. — Kathy Bates
Drama Life Quotes
Those who call me God, will fall into the deep pit of hell. Regard me as one of his slaves and have no doubt whatever about it. I am a servant of the Supreme Being; and have come to behold the wonderful drama of life. — Guru Gobind Singh
Architecture
is a small piece of this human equation, but for those of us who practice it,
we believe in its potential to make a difference, to enlighten and to enrich the
human experience, to penetrate the barriers of misunderstandin g and provide a
beautiful context for life's drama. — Frank Gehry
There was never yet an uninteresting life. Such a thing is an impossibility. Inside of the dullest exterior there is a drama, a comedy, and a tragedy. — Mark Twain
Drama is life with the dull bits left out. There is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it. I believe in putting the horror in the minds of the audience, and not necessarily on the screen. The length of a film should be directly related to the endurance of the human bladder. — Alfred Hitchcock
Whatever dramas are going on in my life, I always find that place inside my head where I see myself as the cleanest, tallest, strongest, wisest person that I can be. — Layne Staley
I need drama in my life to keep making music. — Eminem
The country is lyric, the town dramatic. When mingled, they make the most perfect musical drama. — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
An intelligent observation of the facts of human existence will reveal to shallow-minded folk who sneer at the use of coincidence in the arts of fiction and drama that life itself is little more than a series of coincidences. — Rafael Sabatini
What allows us, as human beings, to psychologically survive life on earth, with all of its pain, drama, and challenges, is a sense of purpose and meaning — Barbara De Angelis
Perhaps all romance is like that; not a contract between equal parties but an explosion of dreams and desires that can find no outlet in everyday life. Only a drama will do and while the fireworks last the sky is a different colour. — Jeanette Winterson
Love Drama Quotes
Jesus will always move away from religious drama and toward the needs of people who are hurting. Jesus will always go out of his way to find and minister to people who others will go out of their way to avoid. I love him for that. — Steven Furtick
The Rosary is the book of the blind, where souls see and there enact the greatest drama of love the world has ever known; it is the book of the simple, which initiates them into mysteries and knowledge more satisfying than the education of other men. — Fulton J. Sheen
I love walking down the street and seeing faces and drama and happiness and sadness and dirt and cleanliness. — Ric Ocasek
I paint the way I do because I can keep on putting more and more things in - like drama, pain, anger, love, a figure, a horse, my ideas of space. It doesn't matter if it differs from mine, as long as it comes from the painting, which has its own integrity and intensity. — Willem de Kooning
Steampunk is...the love child of Hot Topic and a BBC costume drama — Gail Carriger
I'm not interested in 'abstracting' or taking things out or reducing painting to design, form, line, and color. I paint this way because I can keep putting more things in it - drama, anger, pain, love, a figure, a horse, my ideas about space. Through your eyes it again becomes an emotion or idea. — Willem de Kooning
I would love to work in a Bollywood film as there is so much drama and colour in the films there. — Brad Pitt
I like drama. I love being in a drama where I get to be the funny guy. That's what I really love the most. — John Leguizamo
I don't remember a drama on TV that had shown a couple could be married but still love each other very much, spend every day as if they were still on their honeymoon, be sensuous, and have fun together. — Aaron Spelling
It is not because I do not love my adopted land - it is the natural feeling of one far from home, who remembers those happy, carefree days when life flowed at full tide, without responsibility, flashing past one like the drama in a fascinating story of adventure and romance. — Erich von Stroheim
As a child growing up in a grey-skied Yorkshire village, I would occasionally happen upon a Bollywood movie on the television. After a few minutes watching a bunch of sari-clad dancers cavorting on a Swiss mountain to tuneless music, I would switch over to some proper drama about housing estates and single mothers. — Simon Beaufoy
What directors of television drama constantly tell you is 'Don't act it. Don't try. Don't emphasise that word'. Whereas with someone like Blackadder, even though he's a relatively low key character in a way, he did relish the lines that he had and the words that he was given, with a lot of inflection. — Rowan Atkinson
It's the demand in many ways of modern television drama - it's very low key and naturalistic, and, generally speaking, the characters that I've played have not been low key and naturalistic. — Rowan Atkinson
I was doing an hour drama on television and a Jackie Chan movie in Toronto, so I was on a plane every three days. — Debi Mazar
I just like the continue doing what I've been doing. A melange of funny, straight drama, television, movies, a little theater here and there wouldn't hurt. So if I can keep doing that, I'll be a very happy person. — Mary Tyler Moore
How can you put on a meaningful drama when every fifteen minutes proceedings are interrupted by twelve dancing rabbits with toilet paper? — Rod Serling
I grew up in the theatre. It's where I got my start. Writing a television drama with theatrical dialogue about the theatre is beyond perfection. — Aaron Sorkin
Drama's not safe and it's not pretty and it's not kind. People expect the basic template of television drama where there might be naughty villains, but everyone ends up having a nice cup of tea. You've got to do big moral choices and show the terrible things people do in terrible situations. Drama is failing if it doesn't do that. — Russell T Davies
I love action shows. I love drama. There's no one type of thing. Television has gotten so good, and there's so much to do. — Bridget Regan
It is probable that television drama of high caliber and produced by first-rate artists will materially raise the level of dramatic taste of the nation. — David Sarnoff
In television, women can really run anything. It can be a comedy, it can be a drama, it can be genre, it can be anything. But in films, women are still getting to the top — Sarah Michelle Gellar
Crime dramas will never go away as long as people turn to television for, among other things, reassurance and comfort. — Tom Shales
A lot of people are doing television now. Great, legendary actors are doing movies on cable and stuff now, and you can't blame them, because they're still doing adult dramas and adult comedies on those stations. — Billy Bob Thornton
Of the people who cook on television, I have admired people like Jacques Pepin, Julia Child, Mario Batali, Jamie Oliver and a few others because they are free of drama, display good taste and masterful technique, and use clear exposition to bring you up to speed. — Steve Albini
There's even more blending of genres happening. They blend sci-fi with action, or family drama with a mystery show. People don't want to just do the same thing that everybody's done a thousand times before, and that's probably a big part of it. I think you're also seeing television and features speak to each other. You see it happen in movies, and it starts to get reflected on the small screen. — Greg Berlanti
I was dreading all of the ghost stories of working on American television, not in the least, the length. In Britain, a series is six episodes of an hour drama, maybe sometimes eight, but never twenty-two, so I was petrified of that. — Lennie James
It's funny: All my friends back home are always wondering why every television show I'm on is a drama, but all the comedy pilots I did died a slow and painful death. — Eric Ladin
With a play, you do it and it's gone. Films always date. Television drama always dates. Television comedy, for some reason, seems to go on. — Sayings
I always like to look on the optimistic side of life, but I am realistic enough to know that life is a complex matter. With the laugh comes the tears and in developing motion pictures or television shows, you must combine all the facts of life - drama, pathos and humor. — Walt Disney
Some of the most interesting questions needing to be asked today can best be asked on television, or on stage, and they can be wonderful, great dramas, but they won't necessarily be blockbusters. — Julie Walters
You know what I want? The answer is, I truly don't know what I want. I don't want to do a television series. I want to do dramas as well as comedies, but I have no idea what kind or in what order. Just give me the chance at them. — Michael J. Fox
Live television drama was like live theater, because you moved without thinking about the camera. It followed you around. In film you have to be more aware of what the camera is doing. — Louise Fletcher
I grew up doing plays - I went to a stage school after school - and it's always something that I've wanted to do, but, in a weird way, if you do television and film and you didn't go to drama school and don't have a theatrical background, it's hard to get your foot in the door. In the same way that it is for theater actors to get into television and film. There's a weird prejudice that goes both ways. — Christian Cooke
What I've observed is that television in the last decade has increased to something that's almost unrecognizable. They are feature films. That's a huge shift, and it's something the audience expects. They still may want to watch their half-hour sitcom, but when they watch scripted drama, they expect the standard. — John Noble
Film and television as a medium has only very recently begun to be taught at the great drama schools in the UK. When I was at drama school in the UK, I was there for two and a half years, and we did one week of television and film. It's right before you leave. It's like, "We've taught you Anton Chekhov and William Shakespeare, you are likely to be in a washing-up soap-liquid commercial." — James Callis
I worked mostly in television drama for my first few years. I just kept guesting on NYPD Blues and CSI-like stuff, so when I started getting work in comedy, a lot of people in the business would say, 'Oh - I didn't know you did comedy.' — Nick Offerman
[I remember going] to a hotel gym at six o'clock in the morning, and the television was on, and it's some drama in which two men have clearly kidnapped a woman. They're interrogating her, and they put a plastic bag over her head. They're suffocating her, and I'm thinking, It's six o'clock in the morning! Why does anybody need to see this? How can I find the off switch? — Ann Patchett
I suppose drama can either take the place of a novel or can be very closely allied with it. It's quite customary to turn a successful novel into a film or a television series because you can dramatize and pictorialize a novel. — William Golding
Whatever you do, whether you're doing a television drama or a romantic comedy, you want to be relevant, to some degree. — John Ridley
One of the more problematic aspects of the current state of cinema in Japan is that the movies playing in the theaters are by and large made not by film studios but by broadcasting companies. They're either extensions of popular television dramas or adaptations of manga or anime. Younger Japanese are simply not being exposed to good films. That situation needs to change. — Hirokazu Koreeda
If you spend any time on the shooting of a drama, for television or movies, it's very slow and there's a lot of standing around. — Rebecca Eaton
Penalties are not football. They are not even as television people keep telling us, great drama. They are cheap melodrama. — Simon Barnes
I think television is a unique form, in terms of storytelling. Having source material for these really dense, complicated, serialized dramas is a great way of world-building. — Chris Albrecht
I grew up in repertory theaters, so it was comedy one night, drama the next. I'm used to going from one to the other. And I worked for years in television as well. So, I like the interrelationship of it and having a good relationship with a group of artists creating something really where the sum is greater than all of our individual contributions, our parts. — Howard Shore
I certainly do all sorts of work. I'm very, very blessed to do drama and other types of television, and things like that, but I always go back to sci-fi, whenever possible, because that's really exciting for me. — Gina Holden
To try something longer, I entered a half-hour radio drama contest with the national public broadcaster, CBC. To my surprise, I won. And that opened doors in film and television, because that broadcaster was looking to cultivate new Canadian talent, especially women who could write. — Karen Walton
I was my class playwright and I wrote plays set in villages with kings and chiefs.My plays were about treason and betrayals. If they were influenced by Macbeth, they were also influenced by Nigerian plays I had seen and Village Headmaster, a television drama series I had watched as a child. — Sefi Atta
In prose fiction the freedom to work honestly exists, although you may have to fight for it. In those other areas of literature, I mean drama, there is only silence. That sort of aesthetic integrity does not exist in radio and television, and seldom on film. — James Kelman
The experience of reading a novel and watching a television show are quite different. You can't let your audience get ahead of you, and you have to keep the energy and the pace and the drama up. They're very different things. — Michelle Fairley
I'm a great admirer, fan and consumer of television. I love serial drama. I have been a major fan of HBO's series for many years. — Todd Haynes
I started on television, and on sitcoms, and loved them, but then they sort of seemed to be going through sort of an ice age, and they started dying off one by one, and I recognized that, and my representatives recognized that, and we said 'Well, let's look at dramas and other things like that.' — David Alan Basche
The problem is these days people don't watch television together. The husband is downstairs watching The Game and the wife is upstairs watching The Good Wife. They don't need a show they can watch together. What family dramas are on now that are working? — Warren Leight
I'm a right pain in the hole for my agent. I won't take certain parts if I think they're offensive or banal. For instance, I won't do a film if I think it's full of violence for violence's sake, or a television drama if I don't think it's intelligent writing. — Anne-Marie Duff
Police thrillers are so widely read and police dramas so commonplace on television that many people think they have a good understanding of what a cop's world is like. But in truth that world is seldom revealed with anything approaching verisimilitude. We get it with The Wagon. — Daniel Horan
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