Quotes on TV

Artists should be free to create what we want. I believe there's a special value in work that is a reflection of oneself as opposed to interpretation. When I see a film or a TV show about black people not written by someone who's black, it's an interpretation of that life.

I don't believe in comedy as a TV genre - I think there's drama that is funny. Because beyond the laughs, there has to be cost, and there has to be heart.

We start caring way too much about that new TV show or how many likes we're getting on Facebook or what our mother will think of our new house plant. These are bad values that turn us into frivolous people.

I hope we see more avenues for representation. More TV shows and films starring queer people, especially QPOC and nonbinary folks, more mainstream press coverage of our artwork and fashion, and more representation of our interests within politics.

I used to feel that I had to be dictatorial in order to be respected, but after I did a couple of TV movies, I began to see that authority came with the job. So I began to relax and let more people into the process, and my work really improved.

The only thing I can't do is hear. I can drive, I have a life with four kids, I work on TV, I do movies, so the deafness question, is it that they want to know because, what? Not sure.

I had a very ordinary background in Sheffield; I went to a secondary modern, but I saw something on TV in 1968 that inspired me to join an athletics club, and 12 years later, with great coaching and the support of people who loved me a lot, I ended up at an Olympic Games.

We used to watch my father, who was a civil-rights activist, get arrested on TV sometimes, and we never knew if he was going to be home for dinner.

Digital presentation is just television in public; we're all just getting together and watching TV without pointing the remote control at the screen.

Whoopi Goldberg looked like me, she had hair like mine, she was dark like me. I'd been starved for images of myself. I'd grown up watching a lot of American TV. There was very little Kenyan material, because we had an autocratic ruler who stifled our creative expression.

We are constantly - in order to cope with painful realities - shuffling through third-rate, half-remembered fantasies taken from movies, from TV, from people we admire. We do this individually, we do it collectively - we tell stories to escape our most painful truths.

TV started for me just as a means of keeping my husband Desi off the road. He'd been on tour with his band since he got out of the Army, and we were in our 11th year of marriage and wanted to have children.

The Internet offers opportunities that are more unique than ever before. With TV, I know I'm making 22 minutes; I know there's a commercial in the middle. With the Internet, no one knows anything. No rules.

I want to be able to follow the example of those extraordinary British actresses who move effortlessly from film to TV to theatre roles.

I notice when I'm at a party where I don't know anybody - even if I have nothing in common with somebody - we can still talk because we were raised by the same TV and cartoons and movies.

Playing football and presenting TV are totally different things, but there are similarities: it's exciting, it can go well, it can go badly... the difference is when presenting goes badly, it doesn't really affect anyone's life, whereas when you have a bad day on the pitch, it affects people's moods for a whole week.

It would be really cool to have my dad here to witness this, to see his grandchildren, to see this woman that I chose to share my life with, to just come walk on set and be like, 'Ah, this is how you make TV shows and movies.'

When I turned on the TV or the radio, and flicked to the newspaper, I never saw anyone like me. That's what I struggled with the most. I loved Pat Rafter. I couldn't be Pat Rafter. I watched Rove McManus and I couldn't be Rove either.

I wanted to give people that feeling of wanting to hug the TV and just admit that you're unhappy.

Living on $6 a day means you have a refrigerator, a TV, a cell phone, your children can go to school. That's not possible on $1 a day.

A typical TV show is always about protecting the franchise - it's all about stretching it out as long as you can take it. And it's about taking the characters in any given hour as far as you can take them, but then resetting them more or less back to zero so at the beginning of the next week, so they're still the character you know and love.