tv shows

* WISDOM TROVE *

1:Why is it when you turn on the TV you see ads for telephone companies, and when you turn on the radio you hear ads for TV shows, and when you get put on hold on the phone you hear a radio station? ~ jerry-seinfeld, @wisdomtrove

2:To me, the greatest thing in the world is downloading TV shows on iTunes because there are no commercials, and yet if I were a working stiff, I could never afford to do this. But I don't even think about money. ~ stephen-king, @wisdomtrove

3:I have no plans to get an iPad. I know it will do more things than my Kindle, but I don’t want more things. If I want other stuff - movies, TV shows, weather forecasts, the forthcoming Josh Ritter album - I have my Mac. ~ stephen-king, @wisdomtrove

* NEWFULLDB 2.4M *

1:I acted in millions of TV shows. ~ Sebastian Bach,

2:My day job is making TV shows. ~ Seth Grahame Smith,

3:I think TV shows have usurped films! ~ Edie Campbell,

4:I never have kids in movies or in TV shows. ~ David Spade,

5:I watch cartoons the way most adults watch reality-TV shows. ~ Ne Yo,

6:Most TV shows don't reward you for paying attention. ~ Matt Groening,

7:All TV shows are basically part of the same storyline. ~ Lauren Graham,

8:I'm not sitting around thinking of ideas for TV shows. ~ Damon Lindelof,

9:I download TV shows more and more, especially from the US. ~ Julian Ovenden,

10:I've feel like I've been doing TV shows most of my life. ~ Miranda Cosgrove,

11:Our brand at Netflix is really focused on movies and TV shows. ~ Reed Hastings,

12:I came to Hollywood and nobody knew me. I was on a coupla TV shows. ~ Peter Falk,

13:Bit parts in Mediocre TV shows won't develop your acting chops. ~ Stephen Collins,

14:Sometimes you see auteur TV shows and movies, and those are great. ~ Akiva Goldsman,

15:There's so many more better TV shows than films coming out, in my opinion. ~ Amy Smart,

16:And I don't think that success can be measured by how many TV shows you're on. ~ Clay Aiken,

17:In California, they don't throw their garbage away - they make it into TV shows. ~ Woody Allen,

18:The only people who do plays in LA are people who can't get jobs in TV shows. ~ William H Macy,

19:I loved Laurel and Hardy and TV shows like 'Robin Hood' and 'Rama of the Jungle'. ~ Stephen Lang,

20:So many people are are using the Internet now to watch movies and TV shows online. ~ Luke Pasqualino,

21:I want to do more comedy... I've done a couple TV shows that had some comedy going on. ~ Sunny Mabrey,

22:Most TV shows are about strong characters and strong actors, and we certainly have those. ~ Darren Star,

23:My favorite TV shows are Orange Is the New Black, House of Cards, Modern Family, and Veep. ~ Danai Gurira,

24:I liken actors and movies and TV shows to football teams. We all have our favorite ones. ~ Kristoffer Polaha,

25:We've had American TV shows in Britain for years and that hasn't affected our culture at all. ~ Prince Andrew,

26:Whether it's being a leading man, making TV shows, being with my family, I've learned a lot. ~ Ashton Kutcher,

27:male peer reviewers regularly drag down aggregate review scores for TV shows aimed at women, ~ Jaclyn Friedman,

28:The writers' strike a couple years ago was a bonanza for reality TV shows new and old. ~ Carole Nelson Douglas,

29:I'm much more used to the TV shows, which are demanding to write and perform but very fulfilling. ~ Rory Bremner,

30:I never skimp on TV. I watch an embarrassing amount of TV shows. I don't even know how I do it. ~ Dakota Fanning,

31:I'm always working on stuff. But they never materialize. I'm always working on movies and TV shows. ~ Colin Quinn,

32:it’s been estimated that the brain has the storage capacity of three million hours of TV shows (7). ~ Daniel G Amen,

33:I wouldn't know all that I do about history, if I spent my time watching cartoons and other TV shows. ~ Ann Coulter,

34:What if it was cats who invented technology, would they have TV shows starring rubber sqeaky toys? ~ Douglas Coupland,

35:I rarely watch TV, and in the past two years, I've done three TV shows. It's quite interesting. ~ Oliver Jackson Cohen,

36:I'm a character-driven director, and I tend to fall in love with the characters in my movies and TV shows. ~ Doug Liman,

37:I'm not going to watch two TV shows with vaginas in them unless somebody tells me why they're different! ~ Ilana Glazer,

38:You have to understand that I'm not just some guy who voices characters in animated movie and TV shows. ~ Jack McBrayer,

39:I love when people in culture show up on fictional TV shows. I don't mind at all being a name from the '90s. ~ Lisa Loeb,

40:I don't know why British actors are getting big parts in American TV shows. Maybe it's because we're cheap. ~ Dominic West,

41:Writing pilots is such a specific thing. It's not even really writing TV shows. A pilot is its own beast. ~ June Diane Raphael,

42:I can't say I was like a die-hard zombie fan, but I've definitely seen a few different zombie movies and TV shows. ~ Dave Franco,

43:I have terrible taste in things: music, movies, TV shows. I love all the guilty pleasures: Bravo, Real Housewives. ~ Grace Helbig,

44:I've been involved in lots of comic book stuff; I've done numerous films based on comic books and TV shows. ~ Jeffrey Dean Morgan,

45:I can never say a line someone else has given me, which is why script meetings on TV shows always go terribly for me. ~ Alexa Chung,

46:Parodies of commercials are by no means new and have been popular going back to black-and-white TV shows of the '50s. ~ Dan Aykroyd,

47:I had played many gay characters before, but they were finite - guest characters in TV shows or characters in plays. ~ Eric McCormack,

48:Dan Harmon has this idea that characters on TV are allowed to talk about their favorite movies and TV shows and songs. ~ Gillian Jacobs,

49:I never thought I would get such a perfect role in 'Modern Family.' A lot of TV shows now are looking for more Latin women. ~ Sofia Vergara,

50:The Netflix brand for TV shows is really all about binge viewing. The ability to get hooked and watch episode after episode. ~ Reed Hastings,

51:In the long term, you have to believe that movies and TV shows will be like the opera and the novel, pretty nichey businesses. ~ Reed Hastings,

52:So I do have to work, you know, and I find as many movies and TV shows that I can, because otherwise I wouldn't have an income. ~ Tippi Hedren,

53:I think there are a lot more writers who are actors than you know; they just don't have roles on famous TV shows that you recognize. ~ Danny Strong,

54:One of the things I've learned by working on the 'Walking Dead' and other TV shows is to be more tolerant of other people's process. ~ Glen Mazzara,

55:When I did TV shows and my other movies, I never try to do it for anybody. I just do what I think is good no matter what the genre is. ~ Will Gluck,

56:I still play that guitar. It's a Martin D-18 with a clear pick guard. I've played that guitar on and off my TV shows for nearly 50 years. ~ Andy Griffith,

57:I think it's so important for all of us to be able to see ourselves represented in the books we read and the movies and TV shows we watch. ~ Hillary Clinton,

58:Most people get their politics, obviously, from TV shows about senators or movies about them or... all the day-to-day press and the talk shows. ~ Judd Gregg,

59:I did a lot of terrible TV shows and was really terrible in them, and I've done terrible films I was terrible in, but nobody really noticed. ~ George Clooney,

60:If we give people the ability to buy a lot more because they can store a lot more, for a company that creates TV shows and movies, that's fantastic. ~ Bob Iger,

61:I am a little suspicious of industry paradigms. I feel like so many movies and TV shows feel so familiar because of over-reliance on these paradigms. ~ Alan Ball,

62:I’ve given it to, maybe ten of them have actually opened the book and done the exercises. Of those ten, seven have had books, movies, TV shows, ~ Timothy Ferriss,

63:You're used to a TV show, and TV is just made for TV shows. It's not made for live events.So anyways, I was resistant to it, but I did it anyway. ~ Norm MacDonald,

64:The most lucrative work I have done is presenting primetime TV shows. I do not know what other people earn but a six-figure salary is not uncommon. ~ Kate Thornton,

65:There are so many shoot-'em-up, action, jingoistic TV shows and movies that are made every year. I think the final line is that Hollywood is populist. ~ Adam McKay,

66:You know you're getting older when they're making TV shows, sequels or plays for things that you did. It's very flattering and very humbling, indeed. ~ Winona Ryder,

67:younger Franco brother has had a slow, steady introduction to the business, with bit parts in movies like Superbad and TV shows like Greek. Soon enough, ~ Anonymous,

68:I remember when I first came to America and I saw posters for TV shows and I was like, "What?! Why does a television show deserve space on a billboard?" ~ Jamie Bell,

69:It's often the case with successful TV shows that they kind of inadvertently live on past their prime. It's best to leave the audience wanting more. ~ Vince Gilligan,

70:One incredible tool to accomplish bringing a product to the public is to put a face on TV shows, movies, and the actors in them by using good PR. ~ Kristoffer Polaha,

71:Directors, like actors, get typecast. And because I've had great success with comedy and horror and TV shows, that's basically what I'm kind of offered. ~ John Landis,

72:I sort of knew very early on that I wanted to be a writer. Even in high school, I was a big movie buff, very much into TV shows, and would critique them. ~ Lena Waithe,

73:I spend 80% of my time in my restaurants. Taping my TV shows doesn't take much time, and then they get aired a lot. That's the thing people don't realize. ~ Bobby Flay,

74:I'm a human just like any of the people that you adore, whether they're in TV shows or movies or they're writers or YouTubers. Their lives are not perfect. ~ Tyler Oakley,

75:Magazines and TV shows spend a lot of time focusing on what to do when we fall off the wagon rather than teaching us how to stay on it in the first place. ~ Rachel Hollis,

76:I have to be careful of what TV shows I choose, particularly ones that have commercials in them, because it's going to be a different kind of television show. ~ John Hawkes,

77:We watch so many TV shows and movies about jaded or corrupt policemen, we forget people join the police force to do good, and they really care about that. ~ Enrico Colantoni,

78:I want to be like Tom Freston. Tom just flies around everywhere, gets to make movies, gets to start TV shows, hang out with cool people and do whatever he wants. ~ Shane Smith,

79:Even when people are rich and successful on TV shows, there's always some trouble - you have to poke holes in them, throw them out of a job, put a pie in the face. ~ Drew Carey,

80:I did some theatre. I had some smaller roles in a couple TV shows and films. I used to think I did a lot of acting, but my 'career' started when I started Homeland. ~ Morgan Saylor,

81:Today, we live in a culture that is less concerned with excellence and more concerned with authenticity. That’s why there are more than two hundred reality TV shows. ~ Mark Driscoll,

82:If you're going to do a guest spot on television, they need bodies on those procedural TV shows. You've got to keep working, and that's where a lot of the work is. ~ William Mapother,

83:I like doing both comedy and drama. I'm not really feeling more drawn to one over the other. I also like dramedies. I like movies and TV shows that are mixtures of the two. ~ Jane Levy,

84:In other films and TV shows, we might say, "Well, they're just evil." In our show [Daredeval], we're trying to say, "There's bad actions, but not necessarily bad people." ~ Charlie Cox,

85:Like one of those fake-smart, middlebrow TV shows, the speciousness of The Social Network is disguised by topicality. It's really a movie excusing Hollywood ruthlessness. ~ Armond White,

86:But you will be hard-pressed to find more than a few novels, films, news stories, and TV shows that dare to depict life as a gift whose purpose is to enrich the human soul. ~ Rob Brezsny,

87:I've only done two other TV shows [instead of Sex&Drugs&Rock&Roll], one was Rescue Me and the other was a show called The Job, which was at ABC and only on for two seasons. ~ Denis Leary,

88:When I open many books, or most leading women's magazines, or see almost all TV shows, I don't find myself at all. I am completely anonymous. My value system is not there. ~ Bela Karolyi,

89:If a hit came along, I wouldn't be unhappy about that. But I'm a bit too old for that now-doing videos and all those types of TV shows. I've kind of done all that, in the '70s. ~ Nick Lowe,

90:Like the rabid fans of sports, the same goes for fans and their actors, TV shows and movies. You love what you love, and it bonds you with others who love the same thing. ~ Kristoffer Polaha,

91:The truth is there's so many great TV shows out there now that none of us take absence of awards personally. The most important feedback is the feedback we get from the fans. ~ Gale Anne Hurd,

92:Even though the vast majority of my work was outside television, the amount of creation and inventing that went into the TV shows was non stop and, unknown to me, a great strain. ~ Paul Daniels,

93:I've had lots of things that didn't work out, like TV shows. You learn a lot through mistakes - I learned that you have to be the captain of your ship. Actually, I own my ship. ~ Pamela Anderson,

94:I’ve seen trans people in movies and TV shows, but judging by how unrealistic and shitty bi characters tend to be, I’m gonna assume I know nothing. So what’s okay for me to ask? ~ Meredith Russo,

95:I push to be in good films and good TV shows. I don't really pick and choose. I pick and choose what I will read for, and I've gotten to the point where I'm being offered stuff. ~ Darren Shahlavi,

96:I always looked at magazines. Ever since I was little I was obsessed with Elle magazine and the models. I would watch the model TV shows, like the specials on Milla Jovovich. ~ Katherine Bernhardt,

97:It's only in relatively recent years that Hollywood became the playground of multinational corporations which regard movies and TV shows as a minor irritant to their overall activity. ~ Peter Bart,

98:Those people (and shitty TV shows who make cheap jokes about bisexuality not being a thing) have no idea how much time bisexual and queer people spend thinking about their sexuality. The ~ Lane Moore,

99:What they say about TV shows is true. You're really a family. You laugh, you fight, you get close, you know? Movies are shorter. They're over quicker. You don't form the same bonds. ~ James Gandolfini,

100:It's hard to find success and it's hard to find hit movies or hit TV shows and to stay relevant. I think it's a very difficult thing for actors, because a lot of us get lost, frankly. ~ Dylan McDermott,

101:If by that you mean that I dislike celebrity magazines, prefer food to anorexia, refuse to watch TV shows about models, and hate the color pink, then yes. I am proud to be not really a girl. ~ John Green,

102:Didn't any of these brainless wonders ever notice that TV shows were called programs? the same word that meant a bunch of numbers stuck into a computer to make it dance for its masters? ~ Scott Westerfeld,

103:They’re not TV shows. They’re experiments in how to create attention deficit disorders in the entire population with endless commercials and ads that pop up right in the middle of programs. ~ Diana Palmer,

104:All my TV shows are done live in front of audiences, and all the material I take on the road and travel with them test them for hundreds and hundreds of shows before I shoot them for TV. ~ David Copperfield,

105:If we cannot find Osama, bomb Iraq,
If the markets hurt your Mama, bomb Iraq,
If the terrorists are Saudi And the bank takes back your Audi And the TV shows are bawdy, bomb Iraq . . . ~ Garrett Leigh,

106:The really great thing about having two TV shows going on at the same time is that I can go to one and say that I have to go and visit the other and then I can just go home and they don't know. ~ Matt Groening,

107:Why is it when you turn on the TV you see ads for telephone companies, and when you turn on the radio you hear ads for TV shows, and when you get put on hold on the phone you hear a radio station? ~ Jerry Seinfeld,

108:I love sentences. I love characters. But most of all, perhaps, I love to work on plot, and that may be where my natural gifts lie, if I have any. I like to think hard about plots in TV shows and films. ~ Ned Beauman,

109:I left Mexico for artistic survival. If I had stayed, I would have been forced by the government, who control the movie business, to direct TV shows or commercials or infomercials for the government. ~ Alfonso Cuaron,

110:I feel like comedy is doing well right now because there's so many avenues to be seen. Whether it's through the Internet with social media or web videos and now there's so many networks and TV shows. ~ Hannibal Buress,

111:I've got one outlet now - music - and it's great to be able to sign someone that excites me. I'd like to also be able to do that with the scripts I get or books or TV shows... I'm not going to limit myself. ~ Guy Oseary,

112:I suppose the doctor-patient relationship has that idea of transference. I think it's a special thing that doctors have. We all find doctors sexy. That's why there are so many TV shows about doctors. ~ Michael Fassbender,

113:Obviously, in this day and age, with the TV shows, there are some really interesting ones. I'm not that interested in going and doing a network show, but like everybody else, trying to find something good. ~ Scott Speedman,

114:An actor gives voice to the many multitudes that we all contain. That's why we love the movies, why we love TV shows: we watch different people portray an aspect of ourselves, maybe even one we don't like. ~ Kristen Stewart,

115:As soon as the subject moves to TV shows and movies, I'm a total failure. And I'd been paying for all those premium channels for years, but recently cancelled them, since I never watched any of those networks. ~ Ann Coulter,

116:I'm actually really lazy. I tell myself, "Okay, you work six months out of the year and you have to get up at 4 a.m. ..." I'll relish the downtime by chilling on the couch and watching my favorite TV shows. ~ Liana Liberato,

117:To me, the greatest thing in the world is downloading TV shows on iTunes because there are no commercials, and yet if I were a working stiff, I could never afford to do this. But I don't even think about money. ~ Stephen King,

118:As a viewer of TV shows, I always like shows more when I just feel like the people in charge have a plan. You can just tell sometimes, 'Oh, there's a plan there. They have an idea for how this is going to unfold.' ~ Michael Schur,

119:Especially with the video games and social media we have now, I think that turning point from kid to sort of adult has gotten earlier with TV shows that are on right now and video games. They all contribute to that. ~ Gage Munroe,

120:I didn't know the odds were so stacked against me. I went for TV shows and never got them. But I kept glued to the pursuit. I was the biggest fool in town, but ultimately I was the biggest fool in town with a job. ~ Julia Roberts,

121:I think old school TV shows helped in raising your kids and helped in the way things should be done. Now you just see kids disrespecting their parents, you see kids cursing and all kind of things that shouldn't be done. ~ Ginuwine,

122:You've got to do something to fill up your day. And I can only play so much guitar and watch so many TV shows. It fulfills me. There are two things about it I like: It makes me happy, and it makes other people happy. ~ Stephen King,

123:I just watch a lot of different films and different TV shows. Really for me, it's just looking at how people react to different shows in different genres. For me, it's more a study of people than a study of acting. ~ Sterling Beaumon,

124:I have no plans to get an iPad. I know it will do more things than my Kindle, but I don’t want more things. If I want other stuff - movies, TV shows, weather forecasts, the forthcoming Josh Ritter album - I have my Mac. ~ Stephen King,

125:We just haven't found Bigfoot because the world is big. And the woods are deep. The more TV shows that we can get where people go out looking for Bigfoot, the better our chances are. So let's get more of those shows going. ~ Rob Huebel,

126:Why do you watch TV shows — and keep watching them — if you don't like them?" Terence asked.

Simple: Some days, all you have is gazing upon horror, and the small comfort of being surprised that it is not yours. ~ Colson Whitehead,

127:Growing up, I remember my parents feeling a little wary of 'The Simpsons.' This was the late eighties, and there was a wave of articles about TV shows that were bad for America. Then we all started watching it and loved it. ~ Mindy Kaling,

128:It used to be that people would watch TV shows because they knew the characters would stay the same. Whether it's Archie Bunker or it's Thomas Magnum you watch it because it's like, 'I'm comfortable, this is the same guy.' ~ Bryan Cranston,

129:When I first started writing for television in the seventies and eighties, the Internet didn't exist, and we didn't need to worry about foreign websites illegally distributing the latest TV shows and blockbuster movies online. ~ Al Franken,

130:It's very strange what happens when I start working for a film. In my life I've done a lot of stuff - I did a lot of dance music, a lot of TV shows and lots of different types of films - and every time it is a new experience. ~ Claudio Simonetti,

131:There's sort of a very symbiotic thing that happens on good TV shows with great writers, which is that they start to sort of embrace who the actors are and try to make the roles more specific to what they bring and what they can do. ~ Lucas Neff,

132:Sure we all enjoy movies, books and TV shows that portray people putting principles ahead PFB personal gain. But it might be time to admit that in the real world, grandiose patriotism has always been a mask to hide banal self-interest. ~ Chuck Lorre,

133:It’s the reverse of the situation in the West, where politicians try to act like upstanding citizens while films and TV shows are obsessed with the underworld; here the politicians imitate mobsters but the films are rosy. Whenever ~ Peter Pomerantsev,

134:The only difference in reality TV and the other TV is that the scriptwriters for reality TV are not union. I have been on reality TV shows. Believe me, my friends: It's not just improv and whatever happens when the cameras are rolling. ~ Rush Limbaugh,

135:I certainly want to portray the importance of friendship. I had noticed in movies and TV shows that friends often treated one another terribly, and my friends, the few I have, are never cruel to me or unkind, so I wanted to convey that. ~ Jonathan Ames,

136:Many people can't deal with unanswered questions, which religion exploits by providing answers, even if they are just made up by someone. This is also why we love TV shows and movies that neatly wrap up everything in exactly an hour or two. ~ Bill Maher,

137:Movies, novels, TV shows - these are the water fountains of today. We thirst for stories which speak to us by representing us, but we go to the water fountains in the centre of town looking for that, and we're turned away, sent to the ghetto. ~ Hal Duncan,

138:Like all mothers, mother nature is delighted to keep in touch with you when you're appearing in hit tv shows like BJ and the bear and My Two Dads but when you suddenly find yourself hosting When Insects Attack, oh she becomes strangely distant. ~ Greg Evigan,

139:I am a creator of TV shows. 'Lifestyle' ran for 14 years... that was pleasurable. We also had 'Runaway' for eight years. We did two years of a show called 'The Start of Something Big', and we did a network series called 'Fame, Fortune and Romance.' ~ Robin Leach,

140:A borrowed signature story can also come from news accounts, historical events, biographies, novels, fables, TV shows or movies. Whatever the source, the stories must communicate the strategic message in an intriguing, involving and authentic way. ~ David A Aaker,

141:I prioritize in life. I like to work, I do TV shows, I do a lot of Iron Man training. I enjoy kicking back on a good night and drinking wine until I go to bed, and having fun with my friends. You just have to make time for it and keep it balanced. ~ Joe Bastianich,

142:I think I realize now I was really, really scared to express myself through fashion or certain music or certain TV shows. I was petrified that anyone would ever think I was gay god forbid, and so, once I got over that I kind of could just let myself be. ~ Troye Sivan,

143:There are terrific TV shows now. This is a golden age for TV humor, I think. There's an actual market there. Of course, I have no idea how you'd break in, but there must be a way. They have all these shows and they need jokes and somebody is writing them. ~ Dave Barry,

144:I'm fascinated with worlds where there's a small population left, whether it's a movie or these TV shows that fascinate me - 'Falling Skies' or 'The Walking Dead' - they are about survival and triumphing over difficult times. I just have a thing for 'em. ~ Cam Gigandet,

145:I hate remakes of TV shows - I didn't like the new Charlie's Angels at all - and I just don't see the point of going back and doing the same thing over again. Baywatch was fun and successful, probably because we didn't know what the heck we were doing. ~ Pamela Anderson,

146:I do remember the moment when, as a child, I realized that the things we call 'TV shows' are really just the stuff that gets put between commercials. Later, I came to see that the kinds of things that get on 'free' TV are shows that help sell products. ~ Douglas Rushkoff,

147:I think a lot of people who watch TV don't realize when they're watch TV shows and it says 'produced by' and producer, producer... there are all these producers. What the hell does a producer do? It's funny how much you have to worry about as a producer. ~ Demetri Martin,

148:Our level of expectation is crucial to our enjoyment of food, wine, holidays, plays, films and TV shows. We flatter ourselves that we’re objective but our judgments are clouded by our hopes, by whether something was better or worse than we’d anticipated. ~ David Mitchell,

149:There are certain TV shows that probably would have made me rich, and there are certain commitments I could have made that probably would have raised a lot of eyebrows that I didn't. But I don't look back at those decisions and say, 'Oh God, I'm such an idiot. ~ Josh Gad,

150:Well, I think “likability” is an overused word. I don’t watch people 'cause I like them; I watch them because they’re compelling. Sympathetic is a little different... Likable just thins you out. Working to make a character likable is what kills most TV shows. ~ Louis C K,

151:Guys can look like pigs. The girl always has to be a looker. Look at most TV shows: According To Jim - pig and a looker. Still Standing - pig and a looker. Ralph Kramden [on The Honeymooners] - pig and a looker. Family Guy - pig and a looker. It's a theme. ~ Alex Borstein,

152:The teenage girl goes to the fortune-teller, whose gypsy grandmother says she’s cursed.”
“Maybe that was it. Like one of those reality TV shows. You got pranked.”
“In Nanaimo? Must be a low-budget Canadian production.”
“Is there any other kind? ~ Kelley Armstrong,

153:People will always want it [reality TV shows], if it's produced well and if it's telling people's stories - that's all anybody wants: to connect with another human being on a very basic level. If the stories are told well, I think it can continue and continue. ~ Cat Deeley,

154:We're just very belligerent, and I'm not trying to put Americans down, by and large I think we're nice people, but we operate with the information we're given and we are limited by the ignorance that is kind of injected into the media and into the TV shows. ~ Henry Rollins,

155:It was feminism that made it possible for women to go to the Ivy League and women to be astronauts and women to have their own TV shows. What happened, though, was that the generation after feminism, which is my generation, misunderstood what feminism was saying. ~ Debora Spar,

156:As journalism dies, I kind of feel like I want some skills besides writing. I'd like to be able to write movies or host TV shows or whatever. Things that I might actually not inherently like quite as much, but are interesting and fun things to do. A good backup plan. ~ Joel Stein,

157:The first step toward maintaining autonomy in any programmed environment is to be aware that there's programming going on. It's as simple as understanding the commercials are there to help sell things. And that TV shows are there to sell commercials, and so on. ~ Douglas Rushkoff,

158:The part of the light spectrum that is visible to us is less than a ten-trillionth of it. The rest of the spectrum––carrying TV shows, radio signals, microwaves, X-rays, gamma rays, cell phone conversations, and so on––flows through us with no awareness on our part. ~ David Eagleman,

159:Back at home, I caught up on TV shows Bill had been saving. We raced through old episodes of The Good Wife, Madam Secretary, Blue Bloods, and NCIS: Los Angeles, which Bill insists is the best of the franchise. I also finally saw the last season of Downton Abbey. ~ Hillary Rodham Clinton,

160:'The Simpsons' from the very beginning was based on our memories of brash '60s sitcoms - you had a main title theme that was bombastic and grabbed your attention - and when you look at TV shows of the 1970s and '80s, things got very mild and toned down and... obsequious. ~ Matt Groening,

161:From the days of Sumerian clay tablets until now, humans have “published” at least 310 million books, 1.4 billion articles and essays, 180 million songs, 3.5 trillion images, 330,000 movies, 1 billion hours of videos, TV shows, and short films, and 60 trillion public web pages. ~ Kevin Kelly,

162:He feels a little better while watching the guy on TV or thinking of him. Still, he feels insignificant. He has a few heroes whom he sees on other TV shows: sports figures, a tough cop or a late-night talk show host. He lives vicariously through all of them. Unbeknownst ~ Anton Szandor LaVey,

163:She had never seen snow before, except in TV shows and movies. It had looked to her like the stars were flaking out of the sky. It had looked like thousands of fireflies in the moonlight; like breathlessness, like time stopping, like the most beautiful thing she had ever seen. ~ Lauren Oliver,

164:Unlike other books or TV shows or sometimes life, my narrative worlds are stripped of implicit moral centers. There is only what you bring. That makes the characters risky in every way and the narrative, a journey of change for the reader. But I make the journey as fun as I can. ~ Chris Abani,

165:This is the contradiction we have in the media. We love vigilantes: Batman, Tarzan, Green Arrow - the comic books and the TV shows are filled with vigilantes. We love to promote it. Jesus Christ was a vigilante. We admire these people, but we don't want to be associated with them. ~ Paul Watson,

166: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,

167:You know, I must really work hard. I'm in the last stage of my artistic life. But I'm so busy that I can't even think of dying. I fly all over the world, drive everywhere, and when I get home, I find interviewers and photographers and TV shows waiting for me. No wonder I'm so busy. ~ Yayoi Kusama,

168:Since the market tends to go in the opposite direction of what the majority of people think, I would say 95% of all these people you hear on TV shows are giving you their personal opinion. And personal opinions are almost always worthless … facts and markets are far more reliable. ~ William O Neil,

169:I don't have a fear factor. Well, not much of one. And I'm willing to risk quite a lot - as a comedian, you're always risking a lot. You're risking failure, especially if you're improvising and going on TV shows trying to make comedy out of thin air. That is quite a risky business. ~ David Walliams,

170:I think that most of the action in religion is around the home, is in families, and is in individual lives, and they can go on their own searches, watch their own TV shows, read their own books, form their own groups and discuss it, but that's where the action is - on the home front. ~ Bruce Feiler,

171:Like we were saying, the fact that the relationships on the show are love-based, and in the sense that I wasn't aware of how special it was in contrast to a lot of the other TV shows that are on right now. It was our audience members that pointed out the love that you see in the show is special. ~ Steve Zissis,

172:I always wonder: the images that hit your brain when you're young are so significant, because there's not that much information in your brain. As you get older, things just bounce off. I can remember these minute details of stupid TV shows from the '70s, and I can't remember a book I read yesterday. ~ Rob Zombie,

173:People on welfare are getting a price cut to join Amazon Prime, which means you're paying for that. So the food stamp recipients will now get Amazon Prime for $5.99 a month. Free shipping, unlimited streaming of movies and TV shows, which means that these people have to have internet accessibility. ~ Rush Limbaugh,

174:There was one moment of intersection, when the topic of hate-watching came up. "Why do you watch TV shows--and keep watching them--if you don't like them?" Terrence asked.

Simple: Some days, all you have is gazing upon horror, and the small comfort of being surprised that it is not yours. ~ Colson Whitehead,

175:Stand-up is a real art form in itself and one that I really think to be good at you have to devote your entire life to. It's the really, really good ones that end up getting to do the things that I like to do: movies, TV shows, and stuff like that. It's a really hard gig and it just never called to me. ~ Rob Corddry,

176:Yeah, my dad was in the foreign service. We lived in India, Indonesia and Africa, and we traveled a lot from those places. I was 10 when we moved back, and I felt like the odd guy out. It wasn't until later that I appreciated it. But coming back I didn't know any TV shows or music, which was even worse. ~ Dylan Walsh,

177:Twenty years after the Andy Griffith Show when Andy did Matlock, he hired me for four episodes. I told him I wanted to develop an Aunt Bea type role for Matlock, but he was against it. I did appear on other popular TV shows, like Family Affair, My Three Sons, Barnaby Jones and Little House on the Prairie. ~ Betty Lynn,

178:The only two TV shows I saw do that, where they don't warm them up and you can really bomb, was Saturday Night Live - and that's why it gets a lot of heat, too. Obviously it gets criticism fairly, too. But a lot of it is because Lorne [Michaels] lets the audience decide and doesn't force them to laugh. ~ Norm MacDonald,

179:In TV, kid roles are like this: You're either in a couple minutes of an episode playing somebody's kid, or you get in these procedurals where you're crying or you're playing a witness or you're playing a crazy person. Every once in a while you get a big guest star role, but there's a formula to those TV shows. ~ Kyle Gallner,

180:I believe that, not only in chess, but in life in general, people place too much stock in ratings – they pay attention to which TV shows have the highest ratings, how many friends they have on Facebook, and it’s funny. The best shows often have low ratings and it is impossible to have thousands of real friends. ~ Boris Gelfand,

181:I always wish the hotels were like they are in movies and TV shows, where if you're in Paris, right outside your window is the Eiffel Tower. In Egypt, the pyramids are right there. In the movies, every hotel has a monument right outside your window. My hotel rooms overlook the garbage dumpster in the back alley. ~ Gilbert Gottfried,

182:Imagine a hundred million people clicking polls and typing in their favorite TV shows and products and political leanings, day after day. It’s the biggest data profile ever. And it’s voluntary. That’s the funny part. People resist a census, but give them a profile page and they’ll spend all day telling you who they are. ~ Max Barry,

183:You know all those TV shows where the perky twenty-something advertising assistant nabs a swell apartment with a flower planter, bright purple walls, and a reading nook on the Upper West Side? Or when the wet-behind-the-ears dude with an entry-level post at a magazine lands a swank bachelor pad in Tribeca? They lie. ~ Lauren Blakely,

184:But who’s to say what’s stupid and what’s not stupid when your life falls apart? Some people fall apart over TV shows. Some people fall apart over a breakup. Some people fall apart over someone eating the last bowl of Apple Jacks. I fell apart because of the annual art show. No one noticed I was falling apart before then. I ~ A S King,

185:I'd been working on more traditional movie sets and TV shows at Universal. All of a sudden, here we're on location in Animal House, and it's down and dirty and quick. It was the way the new commercial world was shooting; the way the indie world was shooting. These were lighter, faster cameras. It was a generational change. ~ Tim Matheson,

186:I think serious readers of books are 5% of the population. If there are good TV shows or a World Cup or anything, that 5% will keep on reading books very seriously, enthusiastically. And if a society banned books, they would go into the forest and remember all the books. So I trust in their existence. I have confidence. ~ Haruki Murakami,

187:The actual truth about Gad is it's one of the original 13 tribes of Israel, so you can actually trace my lineage back to, like, those guys who had, like, a hand in the Bible and have since become very famous from that. So I come from very famous lineage. Granted, they didn't have cameras back then, so none of them had TV shows. ~ Josh Gad,

188:I want to not think so much about what I want, and what I missed out on. I want to think about other things—other people, in other places even. I am so tired of all the little ironic in-jokes, and reciting lines from TV shows and movies and books. Everything from the . . . circumscribed world. I want an uncircumscribed world. ~ Meg Wolitzer,

189:Music matters,” he told me once. “Pop fiction goes away, TV shows go away, and I defy you to tell me what you saw at the movies two years ago. But music lasts, even pop music. Especially pop music. Sneer at ‘Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head’ if you want to, but people will still be listening to that silly piece of shit fifty ~ Stephen King,

190:Once upon a simpler time, before apps, iPads, Samsung Galaxies, and the world of blazing-fast 4G, weekends were the busiest days of the week at Discount Electronix. Now the kids who used to come in to buy CDs are downloading Vampire Weekend from iTunes, while their elders are surfing eBay or watching the TV shows they missed on Hulu. ~ Stephen King,

191:We spend all our lives growing up with this image of what life is supposed to be. We draw it in our minds from tv shows, books, our parents, just the whole world around us. But the reality isn’t always like that. We don’t get to order it up like a burger made our way. So what about just saying fuck it and taking life as it comes to us? ~ Lauren Landish,

192:I'll only work on TV shows that have a 'Sookie' on them! Those are the only shows that will cast me. And I've never even met a Sookie in my life. Sookie on 'Gilmore Girls' was played by Melissa McCarthy. And Sookie, played by Anna Paquin, is number one on the call sheet on 'True Blood.' Somebody should write another script with a Sookie in it. ~ Todd Lowe,

193:I do think that people get really emotionally involved in the TV shows that they love and I think that is fantastic. Of course they are going to have opinions. The other thing is that people project onto their television shows. They see a character and layer on many traits that are actually their own or their idea of what that character is. ~ Lisa Edelstein,

194:L.A. ispolluted. It's overpopulated. But it is very much home. It was inevitable for me, the moving back. I was living in San Francisco, and Joan broke it off with me, and I needed a place to live. I'd been divorced. And I needed to write movies and TV shows to earn a living. Alimony. All that. So I figured what the hell, I'll go back to L.A. ~ James Ellroy,

195:Now normally I consider nostalgia to be a toxic impulse. It is the twinned, yearning delusion that (a) the past was better (it wasn’t) and (b) it can be recaptured (it can’t) that leads at best to bad art, movie versions of old TV shows, and sad dads watching Fox News. At worst it leads to revisionist, extremist politics, fundamentalist terrorism, ~ John Hodgman,

196:Sometimes directors get hired into TV shows, and it's so formulaic and they're a slave to whatever everybody wants them to do. But everyone came in with their own style, and it blended together with the Helix style that was set, and at the same time, they're bringing their own ideas and their own input. It was really fun working with all of them. ~ Kyra Zagorsky,

197:Doing TV shows helps me a lot in my screenplay writing and filmmaking, especially since my TV shows are in different formats: comedy sketches, talk shows, debate programs, art variety shows, quiz shows. These enable me to meet interesting people with interesting stories and to learn about interesting subjects, all of which I can reflect into film. ~ Takeshi Kitano,

198:When the pop culture is littered with TV shows that portray men as rapists, brutes and predators and women as the never ending victims no matter how much power they acquire, no matter how much the decks are stacked in their favor politically, they're still portrayed as weak and victims and not fairly paid and so forth. And all men want to do is get along. ~ Rush Limbaugh,

199:His eyes flashing, Leary13 evangelized on a cascade of TV shows that he was the founder of a new religion, with cannabis and LSD as its sacraments. These drugs should, he said, be given to twelve-year-olds so they can “fuck righteously14 and without guilt”—and to prove the point he gave them to his own young teenage15 children, even as they went slowly insane.16 ~ Johann Hari,

200:it. But, sometimes, when I’m angry at the TV shows where our murderers speak about our return, I do. On its front page is a picture of Ravi’s mutilated face. The blood from his nose—the result of a blow from the butt of a Kalashnikov—has dried up. His forehead still looks beautiful and clear, and so does his moustache that I had wanted to imitate when I was young. ~ Rahul Pandita,

201:Most movies and TV shows get drugs wrong. Someone takes a bong hit and spends the next few hours laughing uncontrollably. Someone takes acid and steps into the Sergeant Pepper cover. Six Feet Under gets drugs right, so after taking the mushrooms, Claire and her friend hole up in the bedroom, using the sewing machine and wishing they lived in the nineteenth century. ~ David Sedaris,

202:They don’t need our help.” “They don’t need it. But we can sit here and watch TV shows, or we can go get into trouble. What do you think, Suze? Feel up to raiding a ritual sacrifice featuring twelve pimply teenagers and some filet mignon?” A smile blossomed on Suzy’s lips. “This job,” she said with a lot more fondness than she had before. “This fucking job.” Damn straight. ~ S M Reine,

203:They should."

"Should be like a wood bee," she said.

It was a private joke, a mocking appreciation of the slipperiness of even the simplest hope, a nonce catchphrase like so many others lifted from favorite movies or TV shows that served as a rote substitute for conversation and bound them like shut-in twins, each other's best and, most often, only audience. ~ Stewart O Nan,

204:It’s also unfortunate that meetings are typically scheduled like TV shows. You set aside thirty minutes or an hour because that’s how scheduling software works (you’ll never see anyone schedule a seven-minute meeting with Outlook). Too bad. If it only takes seven minutes to accomplish a meeting’s goal, then that’s all the time you should spend. Don’t stretch seven into thirty. ~ Anonymous,

205:For years, all we do is feed. We don’t control what our parents feed us for dinner, we don’t control what they read to us (or don’t read to us) or what they let us watch. We are like jars of wet clay, and we are loaded full with every kind of tale—films; books; TV shows; stories from friends, parents, grandparents. And as we dry, we take the shape of what has been dumped inside of us. ~ Anonymous,

206:I think there seems to be a need for escapism at the moment. Maybe that's the type of world we're living in. It's a sanctuary, in a way, where you can immerse yourself in something that doesn't exist, whether that's TV shows or comic books or novels. it's not solely down to magic and vampires - that's in at the moment. but escapism, being a part of other worlds, is very good for you. ~ Colin Morgan,

207:Be deliberate also about showing her the enduring beauty and resilience of Africans and of black people. Why? Because of the power dynamics in the world, she will grow up seeing images of white beauty, white ability, and white achievement, no matter where she is in the world. It will be in the TV shows she watches, in the popular culture she consumes, in the books she reads. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie,

208:Thanks to NBC News and thanks to the NBC primetime TV network, Donald Trump has been in living rooms for 11 years being who he is. The Donald Trump running for president is not an unknown quantity. The Donald Trump running for president is the Donald Trump everybody's gotten to know, and quite a lot of people watch those Donald Trump TV shows, The Apprentice and whatever else on there. ~ Rush Limbaugh,

209:I do think a lot of sexual violence stems from experiences in childhood or at puberty. Some people become sadistic after suffering early abuse at the hands of parents, relatives or friends. But for others, the seed is planted in the formative years by the conflation of images of violence with those of sexual arousal. Magazines, TV shows and, especially, slasher movies are masters at doing this. ~ Park Dietz,

210:I hate those TV shows where characters talk about one thing, such as their patient on the operation table (let's say they're a doctor), then you realize they're actually talking about actually talking about themselves. The patient's open-heart surgery is nothing compared to their own messed-up heart or whatever. It's selfish. And means they're not concentrating, which is medical negligence. ~ Jaclyn Moriarty,

211:You must head down your path to riches with a sense of urgency or else you’ll fall prey to distractions, laziness, limiting beliefs, procrastination, binge watching TV shows. Work with diligent focus and grateful expectation, do all you can every day to the best of your ability, remember that the sooner you achieve your financial goals, the longer you get to spend on Earth basking in your riches. ~ Jen Sincero,

212:The American accent is a little bit tricky. We grew up with American TV shows, so we've had a lot of exposure to it and that helps, but there's little nuances and little details. Sometimes there'll be just a phrase or couple words that are really difficult to get your mouth around. At the end of every season we go over and revoice anything that has sound issues, including my kiwi accent coming out. ~ Antony Starr,

213:We are doing the jobs of ten different people while still trying to keep up with our lives, our children and parents, our friends, our careers, our hobbies, and our favorite TV shows. It’s no wonder that sometimes one memory gets confounded with another, leading us to show up in the right place but on the wrong day, or to forget something as simple as where we last put our glasses or the remote. ~ Daniel J Levitin,

214:There's something about TV shows and the format that becomes a bit more personal. People watch two, three in a row before they get out of bed on their laptop or when they get home from going out and before they go to sleep. People make shows part of their daily routine, and that makes them take ownership of it. If you're so arrogant as to call yourself an artist, you can't ask for anything more than that. ~ Jay Baruchel,

215:People in America are not ignorant of Christianity. They’ve heard the message, seen our churches on every corner, they flick by our Christian TV shows, they see our fish symbols on the backs of our cars. They’ve seen so much of pop Christian culture that they have a programmed response to us: Ignore, ignore, ignore. What’s needed is a change of parameters—something that will alter their emotional response. ~ Jen Hatmaker,

216:...rarely do the 'significant events' in our lives change us. At least, not in any way we want. The people who suffer tragedy and go on to greatness? They're the stuff of movies and TV shows and books, and--only very rarely--real life. Most of us just go on, the walking wounded, dealing with our lives. This doesn't make us bad--it just means we're not superheroes. It means we're just people, like everyone else. ~ Barry Lyga,

217:The British have been more up for it than the Americans were, particularly with respect to nudity in the show. In Europe there are adverts that show the breasts, so people are less frightened of that aspect of the show. Americans can withstand incredible violence on TV shows - which, as I come from England and Canada, I find difficult to stomach - but they are more puritanical when it comes to nudity on screen. ~ Kim Cattrall,

218:I mean, a lot of people don't realize it, but fashion is one of the most racial industries left out there now. Radio and music aren't. Television and movies aren't. Even commercials now are showing interracial couples. You see a lot of diversity in TV shows, but you don't see that in fashion. You think there would be some, because the consumer is of all colors and all shades. But you don't see that in fashion. ~ Tyson Beckford,

219:I think right now there's more TV shows than ever. You've got network, you've got cable, you've got Netflix, you've got Hulu, even Amazon is putting out original content. So there's a lot of opportunities to find fans. You don't have to have a huge audience. You can cater to the people that like your stuff. So there is a boom in comedy and television and stand-up too through podcasting and all the different talk shows. ~ Hannibal Buress,

220:It is hard to believe that Bill Cosby is a serial rapist because the belief doesn't just indict Cosby, it indicts us. It damns us for drawing intimate conclusions about people based on pudding-pop commercials and popular TV shows. It destroys our ability to lean on icons for our morality. And it forces us back into a world where seemingly good men do unspeakably evil things, and this is just the chaos of human history. ~ Ta Nehisi Coates,

221:The Divorce isn't like the Da Vinci Code of TV shows. I'm not saying only a secret society is going to understand divorce. But it is a very specific show. And I don't know if you looked at a lot of the press. There's been some unpleasant reviews. And I'm not faulting those people but, they're really just not getting what we're trying to do. Which is to say, look. That may not be some people's taste. And that's fine. ~ Thomas Haden Church,

222:I feel connected with people because of their sense of humor, worldview, and what they think and feel about certain existential issues (things not affected, in my view, by if someone rides a horse or drives a car or talks only IRL or only by typing), not how old they are, what they use to convey what they think and feel about certain existential issues, or if we have both watched the same TV shows or looked at the same websites. ~ Tao Lin,

223:You never know how things work and what exactly is going to grab an audience. Sometimes even the best material and the best collection of people interpreting that material just for some reason doesn't fly with people. There are a lot of TV shows or movies that maybe aren't as good as others that do work when it comes to finding an audience. It's a mystery, that whole thing. If somebody figured it out, this would be quite a great industry. ~ Timothy Hutton,

224:Now normally I consider nostalgia to be a toxic impulse. It is the twinned, yearning delusion that (a) the past was better (it wasn’t) and (b) it can be recaptured (it can’t) that leads at best to bad art, movie versions of old TV shows, and sad dads watching Fox News. At worst it leads to revisionist, extremist politics, fundamentalist terrorism, and the victory—in Appalachia in particular—of a narcissist Manhattan cartoon maybe-millionaire ~ John Hodgman,

225:You and your scars. Please! You don't kill youself like this!" I gesture, holding a wrist turned up to the ceiling, then pretending to cut across it with my other hand. "That's just a cry for help. That's just attention. Everbody knows that. Cutting across just gets you to the hospital. That's just from movies and TV shows and stuff like that. You didn't really try to kill yourself. you just wanted attention, but you screwed up. Try harder next time. ~ Barry Lyga,

226:We're just gonna keep making things and challenging ourselves to make them more cheaply and more renegade and more interesting. That's the only thing we might challenge ourselves to do in the age of so many movies and so many TV shows. We're aware that we're asking time of people to watch stuff, and that there's so much stuff to watch, so we're gonna try to offer you something unique. And it may not always succeed, but it will definitely be different. ~ Mark Duplass,

227:It's impossible to overvalue the importance of television - both in its serious and less serious functions. It's one of our most important ways of finding out the truth - and also of changing the world, and finding out what in the world needs changing. It's also an immense bringer of joy - I learnt how to laugh through television, and now my children and I, every day of every week, share the joy and stupidity of TV shows - they actually make us HAPPY ~ Richard Curtis,

228:The scheduling thing is really weird with TV shows. Certain projects haven't been able to work out because of the schedule, so some of it is out of your control. You don't have very many opportunities. There isn't much time, so you want to make sure you're going to be doing something that you really feel good about or that you're going to have a good creative experience doing. You're taking up vacation time from your job, so you want it to be meaningful. ~ Ty Burrell,

229:I never really even tried. But if I'm not a New York actress, what am I? I'm a person who takes a subway from the outer boroughs to lower Manhattan office every morning, who spends her days answering phones and doing copying, who is too disconsolate when she gets back to her apartment at night to do anything but sit on the couch and stare vacantly at reality TV shows until she falls asleep. Oh Godm it really was true, wasn't it? I really was a secretary. ~ Julie Powell,

230:I traveled and worked with amazing actors, like Andy Garcia, Alec Baldwin, Brendan Fraser, Forest Whitaker, Lee Pace. It was this great learning experience. And then, I started watching a lot of television. I was always in these foreign countries and I would get TV shows on DVD, and I started to realize that all of the amazing roles for women were on television. I was spoiled by Buffy because I thought that was the way it was everywhere, and it's not. ~ Sarah Michelle Gellar,

231:So I'm on a little one-man crusade to bring the obituary closer to the front of the paper. Let's sing a bit louder about the unsung. Rather than spending all our time watching stupid people doing stupid things and being filmed by other stupid people on reality TV shows, why don't we spend a few minutes each day reading about good people doing good things? I'm not being a hippy. It's just that we've got to improve ourselves as a species or we are absolutely doomed. ~ Billy Connolly,

232:Quite frankly, I had been in a dating slump. More precisely, I hadn’t wanted to date. I still didn’t, not really. I enjoyed being alone. I enjoyed my quiet moments. In the past, my relationships had proven to be more troublesome than they were worth. Truth was, I was pretty certain that I’d never been in full-blown love, even though I had said the words on occasion. That was okay. I loved my quiet life, instead. My simple life. I loved my books and TV shows, and my long walks. ~ J R Rain,

233:• What unites them is an almost reckless desire to test themselves in the most extreme circumstances. In many respects the life they have chosen is a complete rejection of the hyped, consumerist American dream as it is dished out in reality TV shows and pop-song lyrics. They've chosen asceticism over consumption. Instead of celebrating their individualism, theyíve subjugated theirs to the collective will of an institution. Their highest aspiration is self-sacrifice over self-preservation. ~ Evan Wright,

234:• What unites them is an almost reckless desire to test themselves in the most extreme circumstances. In many respects the life they have chosen is a complete rejection of the hyped, consumerist American dream as it is dished out in reality TV shows and pop-song lyrics. They've chosen asceticism over consumption. Instead of celebrating their individualism, theyíve subjugated theirs to the collective will of an institution. Their highest aspiration is self-sacrifice over self-preservation. ~ Evan Wright,

235:And we've read scary books and watched scary movies and TV shows together. He's met monsters, ghouls, and demons on the page and on the screen. There's nothing like watching Anaconda with your best friend or lying in bed next to your mother reading Roald Dahl, because that way you get to explore dark stuff safely. You get to laugh with it, to step out on the vampire's dance floor and take him for a spin, and then step back into your life. When you make friends with fear, it can't rule you. ~ Anne Lamott,

236:You live in a society that has made it more comfortable to read a book about the ten ways to get a guy or girl to fall in love with you, or to obsess about your romantic love life, than to share your self-love journey with your friends and family. You’re bombarded with images and media, like reality TV shows, whose underlying message tells you it’s normal to look to outside sources for confirmation that you are good enough, rather than to unapologetically stand for self-respect and self-worth. ~ Christine Arylo,

237:No one has to tell her that her body makes her irrelevant to that entire conversation.
Grace has never questioned her body's place in the world. She's always believed the laws of movies and TV shows: Chubby girls are sidekicks, not romantic leads; sometimes they get to be funny, but more often they're the butt of jokes; if they're powerful, they'e evil- they're Ursula the sea witch from The Little Mermaid: they are not heroines and they are certainly not sexy. These are the rules. This is the script. ~ Amy Reed,

238:I couldn't take my eyes off of Stan [Lee]! As good as the movie is, all I could think about is, "What's he thinking?" So the movie ended, and then he, very whimsically, expressed all of his feelings about how long he waited, and how the TV shows in the '70s were all, "If only they could do this," and now they could. And he didn't get choked up and blubbery, but he was moved. Like, "Ohmigod, it happened while I was alive." And I can't believe I got to see that. He was very raw. It was quite beautiful. ~ Brian Michael Bendis,

239:Some TV shows are like really good novels in that there are enough episodes that you start to have your own feelings about how the characters should act. When the scriptwriters go slightly wrong, when they make the character make a left turn that he or she wouldn't do, you know enough about the characters to say, "No, that's not what she would do there. That's wrong." You can actually argue with a TV show in a way that you can't do as much with movie - you inhabit a TV show in the way you inhabit a novel. ~ Nicholson Baker,

240:They told you to get your résumé in order, to punch your ticket, to fit in, and to follow instructions. They told you to swallow your pride, not to follow your dream. They promised trinkets and prizes and possibly riches if you would just suck it up and be part of the system, if you would merely do what you were told and conform. They sold you debt and self-storage and reality TV shows. They sold your daughters and sons, too.

All in exchange for what would happen later, when it was your turn. It’s your turn. ~ Seth Godin,

241:The average American child sees 20,000 murders in TV before reaching age 18. This is considered normal. Every community has video rental stores filled with multimillion-dollar films that depict people doing terrible things to each other. If you read newspapers, you have every right to believe that Bad Nasty Things compose 90 percent of the human experience. But you will be hard-pressed to find more than a few novels, films, news stories, and TV shows that dare to depict life as a gift whose purpose is to enrich the human soul. ~ Rob Brezsny,

242:I watched other kids and tried to figure out what made me different. Was it their clothes, their expressions, their hair? Was it the TV shows they talked about, the songs they sang, the way they stood with their hands in their pockets and their JanSport backpacks dangling from just one shoulder? How did some girls know, without being told, which boys to talk to and which to avoid? Why was Andrea Freeh, who was very heavy, popular with girls and boys, while Monica Levy, who was just slightly chunky, was derided as fat, with no friends at all? ~ Jennifer Weiner,

243:...normally I consider nostalgia to be a toxic impulse. It is the twinned, yearning delusion that (a) the past was better (it wasn´t) and (b) it can be recaptured (it can´t) that leads at best to bad art, movie versions of old TV shows, and sad dads watching Fox news. At worst it leads to revisionist, extremist politics, fundamentalist terrorism, and the victory-in Appalachia in particular-of a narcissist Manhattan cartoon maybe-millionaire and cramped-up city creep who, if he ever did go up to Rocky Top in real life, would never come down again. ~ John Hodgman,

244:The information age has off-loaded a great deal of the work previously done by people we could call information specialists onto all of the rest of us. We are doing the jobs of ten different people while still trying to keep up with our lives, our children and parents, our friends, our careers, our hobbies, and our favorite TV shows. It’s no wonder that sometimes one memory gets confounded with another, leading us to show up in the right place but on the wrong day, or to forget something as simple as where we last put our glasses or the remote. ~ Daniel J Levitin,

245:One of the first TV shows that I did was this prank show. And we did a prank where we took a Michael Jackson impersonator and I played his publisher.I was just really good at my job.We were just about to go onto the field to throw out the first pitch just two weeks after 9\11. It was a huge security breach, and we made a lot of cops look really dumb. Producers of the show thought it would be really funny and I didn't think about it because I was a young dumb comedian. So I got arrested and went to jail in the Bronx, and now I can never go back to Yankee Stadium. ~ Rob Huebel,

246:When I did TV shows and movies, the studios did demographic research. They were shocked to find that my audience isn't just men who are too drunk to turn off the TV after football. It's women, too. I don't know exactly why, other than that I've tried to remain true to myself for all these years. I have gone through a lot, and I've been open about it. Maybe they look at me and can see how you can grow up, have children, continue to be sexy, get married and divorced and, though you grew up poor, live the American dream. I'm very blessed. I'm happy for it all. ~ Pamela Anderson,

247:Quite a few people still listen to vinyl records, use film cameras to take photographs, and look up phone numbers in the printed Yellow Pages. But the old technologies lose their economic and cultural force. They become progress’s dead ends. It’s the new technologies that govern production and consumption, that guide people’s behavior and shape their perceptions. That’s why the future of knowledge and culture no longer lies in books or newspapers or TV shows or radio programs or records or CDs. It lies in digital files shot through our universal medium at the speed of light. ~ Nicholas Carr,

248:WE have to take care of this world. WE can't wait any longer. WE need to stop using fossil fuels. Get behind the green new deal. WE are running out of time. Stop being distracted by reality TV shows in the White House. Climate Change is what Reality looks like.
The mud slides are coming. The rain is coming. The timing is all off. The rain could have saved California. Now it is coming to bury the things we've done. This is what you and I are leaving our kids. Wake up. Love one another. Save one another. The Earth is talking to us. LOVE.
- more at the neil young archives website ~ Neil Young,

249:...but wasn't everyone in England supposed to be a detective? Wasn't every crime, no matter how complex, solved in a timely fashion by either a professional or a hobbyist? That's the impression you get from British books and TV shows. Sherlock Holmes, Miss Marple, Hetty Wainthropp, Inspector George Gently: they come from every class and corner of the country. There's even Edith Pargeter's Brother Cadfael, a Benedictine monk who solved crimes in twelfth-century Shrewsbury. No surveillance cameras, no fingerprints, not even a telephone, and still he cracked every case that came his way. ~ David Sedaris,

250:As far as I could tell, my history teacher had three passions in life: quoting Shakespeare, identifying historical inaccuracies in cable TV shows, and berating Ryan Washburn. “Eighteen sixty-three, Mr. Washburn. Is that so hard to remember? Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation in eighteen sixty-three.” Ryan was a big guy: a little on the quiet side, a little shy. I had no idea what it was about him that had convinced Mr. Simpson he needed to be taken down a notch—or seven. But more and more, this was how history class went: Simpson called on Ryan, repeatedly, until he made a mistake. And then it began. ~ Jennifer Lynn Barnes,

251:Why are we so confused about what police really do? The obvious reason is that in the popular culture of the last fifty years or so, police have become almost obsessive objects of imaginative identification in popular culture. It has come to the point that it's not at all unusual for a citizen in a contemporary industrialized democracy to spend several hours a day reading books, watching movies, or viewing TV shows that invite them to look at the world from a police point of view, and to vicariously participate in their exploits. And these imaginary police do, indeed, spend almost all of their time fighting violent crime, or dealing with its consequences. ~ David Graeber,

252:Of course, it is true that plastic surgeries and sex reassignments are “artificial,” but then again so are the exercise bikes we work out on, the antiwrinkle moisturizers we smear on our faces, the dyes we use to color our hair, the clothes we buy to complement our figures, and the TV shows, movies, magazines, and billboards that bombard us with “ideal” images of gender, size, and beauty that set the standards that we try to live up to in the first place. The class systems based on attractiveness and gender are extraordinarily “artificial”— yet only those practices that seem to subvert those classes (rather than reaffirm them) are ever characterized as such. ~ Julia Serano,

253:The dads in those tv shows spend a great deal of time talking to their kids in their living rooms. Steven Keaton - the dad of my dreams - seems to do nothing but sit on his couch or at his kitchen table talking to his children about their myriad teenage calamities. He listens and listens to his kids and he pours glasses of orange juice and hands them to his kids as he listens some more. He tells his kids he loves them by telling his kids he loves them. Dad tells me he loves me when he forms a pistol out of this forefinger and thumb and points it at me as he farts. He tells us he loves us by showing us the tattoo we never knew he had on the inside of his bottom lip: Fuck you. ~ Trent Dalton,

254:What remains of the old Protestant fundamentalism is politics: abortion, gays, evolution. these issues are what binds congregations together. but even here things have changed as Americans have become more tolerant of many of these social taboos. Today many fundamentalist churches take nominally tough positions on, say, homosexuality but increasingly do little else for fear of offending the average believer, whom one schollar calls the "unchurched Harry". All it really takes to be a fundamentalist these days is to watch the TV shows, go to the theme parks, buy Christian rock, and vote Republican. The Sociologist Mark Shilbey, calls it the Californication of conservative Protestantism. ~ Fareed Zakaria,

255:Netflix’s algorithm has a deeper (even if still quite limited) understanding of your tastes than Amazon’s, but ironically that doesn’t mean Amazon would be better off using it. Netflix’s business model depends on driving demand into the long tail of obscure movies and TV shows, which cost it little, and away from the blockbusters, which your subscription isn’t enough to pay for. Amazon has no such problem; although it’s well placed to take advantage of the long tail, it’s equally happy to sell you more expensive popular items, which also simplify its logistics. And we, as customers, are more willing to take a chance on an odd item if we have a subscription than if we have to pay for it separately. ~ Pedro Domingos,

256:Thirty years ago, travel agents made our airline and rail reservations, salesclerks helped us find what we were looking for in stores, and professional typists or secretaries helped busy people with their correspondence. Now we do most of those things ourselves. The information age has off-loaded a great deal of the work previously done by people we could call information specialists onto all of the rest of us. We are doing the jobs of ten different people while still trying to keep up with our lives, our children and parents, our friends, our careers, our hobbies, and our favorite TV shows. It’s no wonder that sometimes one memory gets confounded with another, leading us to show up in the right place but on the wrong day, or to forget something as simple as where we last put our glasses or the remote. ~ Daniel J Levitin,

257:So I spilled my guts already. Your turn. If you won’t tell me what happened just now, at least tell me what happened at the tattoo place.”
I did. I was tempted to joke that his dad was right--apparently I was evil--but he wouldn’t appreciate that.
When I was done, he stood there, his broad face screwed up in disbelief. “So this old lady, who’s never met you before, sees your birthmark and says you’re a witch?”
“Sounds like something from a TV movie, doesn’t it?” I hummed a few bars of suitably sinister music. “Should have been a fortune-teller, though. The teenage girl goes to the fortune-teller, whose gypsy grandmother says she’s cursed.”
“Maybe that was it. Like one of those reality TV shows. You got pranked.”
“In Nanaimo? Must be a low-budget Canadian production.”
“Is there any other kind? ~ Kelley Armstrong,

258:So much happened, though, in our early, prechildren days, that served to turn our life around irretrievably.
Much of it came from small, serendipitous, unlikely turns of events--like driving for many hours to do a small Everest talk for a charity and finding out afterward that the young son of the head of Channel 4 (the large UK TV network) was there.
He then told his dad that I should do a TV show for the network.
Kids, eh?
Or getting spotted by the Discovery Channel, after having been chosen out of many climbers to be the subject of a big worldwide “Sure for Men” deodorant TV campaign. (Ironically, this one came just days after Dad died--which always felt like his little spark of a parting gift to me. And, wow, there were so many little gifts from him throughout his life.)
But would I ever have done the bigger TV shows without minibreaks like those?
I doubt it.
But from small acorns grow big oaks. ~ Bear Grylls,

259:There are streaming media devices like Roku, Kodi, or Amazon’s Fire TV Stick that allow you to access most of the same programs that you normally get through a cable subscription. Each of these devices gives you access to thousands of streaming channels. Some are free and some are premium. Even if you pay for two or three of these services, it still results in a significant cost savings. For instance, my setup is simple right now and only costs an average of $40 (as of March 2017), which is significantly less than the $130+ cable bill we once had: Netflix ($7 monthly) Amazon Prime ($99 per year or $8 monthly) Sling TV ($25 monthly) With Netflix and Amazon, you can watch most of the movies, documentaries, and premium TV shows that you love. And with Sling TV, you have access to your favorite network shows. It’s television-on-demand at its best, and more importantly, you don’t have to sit through commercials, which are distracting and reinforce negative spending habits. ~ S J Scott,

260:And what if the other kids laugh at me?” Kerry complained to her parents as she nibbled on a piece of toast that morning. “I have a Cape Breton accent! They’ll know I’m from Canada and they’ll start asking me if I lived in an igloo or ate maple syrup, bacon and seal meat every day!”

“You’re really overreacting,” Susan chuckled, sipping on a glass of orange juice. “Canada is a lot like the States and the only thing separating both countries is an imaginary boarder! If anyone laughs at you, tell them it doesn’t snow year-round, you got free health care while you were there and that you never rode a polar bear to school. Besides, do you know how many popular movies and TV shows from the States were filmed in Canada?”

“It’s not just the Canada stuff mom,” Kerry sighed worriedly. “I’m from Dym, it’s an industrial dump!”

“Yeah, and have you looked at Pittsburgh lately?” Susan asked. “Full of coal mines and steel mills, just like Sydney was when we lived there! I actually rather came to like the pollution, I don’t think I’d ever want to leave it. ~ Rebecca McNutt,

261:14. Pack Light

This brings us to the stage of our journey where I can begin to equip you with some of the key ‘know-how’ to help you survive the many obstacles that lie ahead.

Now, there is ‘good’ kit we need to carry and then there is ‘bad’ kit. The ‘good’ is the list we are going to start compiling. The ‘bad’ is the stuff we are going to drop. Ultimately I want you to be empowered with a super-efficient, totally functional kit list made up of solid principles on which to build your life and adventure.

And here is the reason why we want to keep our kit list light:

On an expedition, obviously you never want to carry more gear than you need. Unnecessary kit is just extra weight - and too much baggage slows you down. Part of the appeal of the TV shows I do is that they show how you can survive with just a bottle of water, a decent knife and some key know-how.

The message is that attitude is king and the greatest resource we have is inside of us all. Pack the right skills, and the right attitudes, and you don’t need much else. ~ Bear Grylls,

262:9. We Can Do Better Than Happiness. We live at a time when the search for happiness has taken center stage as never before. Books, TV shows, and websites are constantly offering pointers about how to finally achieve and sustain this elusive and sought-after state of being. If only we were happy, everything would be okay. Imagine a drug that would make you perfectly happy, but remove any interest you might have in doing anything more than simple survival. You would lead a thoroughly boring treadmill of a life, from the outside—but inside you would be blissfully happy, romping through imaginary adventures and always-successful romantic escapades. Would you take the drug? Think of Socrates, Jesus, Gandhi, Nelson Mandela. Or Michelangelo, Beethoven, Virginia Woolf. Is “happy” the first word that comes to mind when you set out to describe them? They may have been—and surely were, from time to time—but it’s not their defining characteristic. The mistake we make in putting emphasis on happiness is to forget that life is a process, defined by activity and motion, and to search instead for the one perfect state of being. There can be no such state, since change is the essence of life. ~ Sean Carroll,

263:Critics are also overwhelmingly male—one survey of film review aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes found only 22 percent of the critics afforded “top critic” status were female.14 More recently, of course, we have become accustomed to a second set of gatekeepers: our friends and family and even random strangers we’ve decided to follow on social media, as well as “peer” reviewers on sites like Goodreads and IMDb. But peer review sites are easily skewed by a motivated minority with a mission (see the Ghostbusters reboot and the handful of manbabies dedicated to its ruination) or by more stubborn and pervasive implicit biases, which most users aren’t even aware they have. (The data crunchers at FiveThirtyEight.com found that male peer reviewers regularly drag down aggregate review scores for TV shows aimed at women, but the reverse isn’t true.)15 As for the social networks we choose? They’re usually plagued by homophily, which is a fancy way to say that it’s human nature to want to hang out with people who make us feel comfortable, and usually those are people who remind us of us. Without active and careful intervention on our part, we can easily be left with an online life that tells us only things we already agree with and recommends media to us that doesn’t challenge our existing worldview. ~ Jaclyn Friedman,

264:And her apparent eagerness to follow Tyler into the cauldron dried up all my professional zeal, and I had nothing more to say. Samantha just watched me to see what I would do—and for the first time in my life, I had absolutely no idea what that would be. What is the correct facial expression to put on when someone tells you their lifelong fantasy is to be eaten? Should I go for shock? Disbelief? What about moral outrage? I was quite sure the subject had never come up in any of the movies or TV shows I had studied, and even though I am considered a clever and creative person in some circles, I could not imagine anything at all that might be appropriate. So I stared, and Samantha looked back at me, and there we were: a perfectly normal married man with three kids and a promising career who just happened to enjoy killing people, staring at a perfectly normal eighteen-year-old girl who went to a good school and liked Twilight and who wanted to be eaten, sitting next to each other in a walk-in refrigerator at a vampire club in South Beach. I had been trying so hard lately to achieve some close approximation of normal life, but if this was it, I thought I would prefer something else. Outside of Salvador Dalí I really can’t believe the human mind could handle anything more extreme. And at last even the mutual staring began to seem too strange, even for two dedicated non-humans like us, and we both blinked and looked away. ~ Jeff Lindsay,

265:Aside from wanting to write cracking good books that turn children into lifelong readers, I really want to create stories that enable kids to LOOK at the world around them. To see it for what it is, with wide open, wondering eyes. Our mass media is so horribly skewed. It presents this idea of 'normalcy' which excludes and marginalises so many for an idea of commercial viability which is really nothing but blinkered prejudice. People who are black and Asian and Middle Eastern and Hispanic, people who are gay or transgendered or genderqueer, people who have disabilities, disfigurements or illnesses - all have this vision of a world which does not include them shoved down their throats almost 24-7, and they're told 'No one wants to see stories about people like you. Films and TV shows about people like you won't make money. Stories about straight, white, cisgendered, able-bodied people are universal and everyone likes them. You are small and useless and unattractive and you don't matter.'

My worry is that this warped version of 'normal' eventually forms those very same blinkers on children's eyes, depriving them of their ability to see anyone who isn't the same as them, preventing them from developing the ability to empathise with and appreciate and take joy in the lives and experiences of people who are different from them. If Shadows on the Moon - or anything I write - causes a young person to look at their own life, or the life of another, and think, 'Maybe being different is cool' I will die a happy writer.

-Guest blog - what diversity means to me ~ Zo Marriott,

266:In the nineties…yes, we were ecstatic; there’s no way back to that naïveté. We thought that the choice had been made and that communism had been defeated forever. But it was only the beginning… Twenty years have gone by…“Don’t try to scare us with your socialism,” children tell their parents. From a conversation with a university professor: “At the end of the nineties, my students would laugh when I told them stories about the Soviet Union. They were sure that a new future awaited them. Now it’s a different story…Today’s students have truly seen and felt capitalism: the inequality, the poverty, the shameless wealth. They’ve witnessed the lives of their parents, who never got anything out of the plundering of our country. And they’re oriented toward radicalism. They dream of their own revolution, they wear red T-shirts with pictures of Lenin and Che Guevara.” There’s a new demand for everything Soviet. For the cult of Stalin. Half of the people between the ages of nineteen and thirty consider Stalin an “unrivaled political figure.” A new cult of Stalin, in a country where he murdered at least as many people as Hitler?! Everything Soviet is back in style. “Soviet-style cafés” with Soviet names and Soviet dishes. “Soviet” candy and “Soviet” salami, their taste and smell all too familiar from childhood. And of course, “Soviet” vodka. There are dozens of Soviet-themed TV shows, scores of websites devoted to Soviet nostalgia. You can visit Stalin’s camps—Solovki, Magadan—as a tourist. The advertisements promise that for the full effect, they’ll give you a camp uniform and a pickaxe. They’ll show you the newly restored barracks. Afterward, there will be fishing… ~ Svetlana Alexievich,

267:Years ago, I was yapping to my mother about Buffy and Xena and talking about how great it is that we now have these TV shows about such strong female characters. My mother, who admittedly has never watched either show, asked me if these really WERE strong female characters, or if they were merely male characters with boobs.

Having a blonde cheerleader save the world with her martial arts skills doesn't equal feminism, she said. That's a male tactic. How about her saving the day using tactics that aren't all about punching and kicking and killing?

I didn't have an answer for her then. I still don't, even now. There's a whole debate to be had that I'm just not ready for, that I may never be ready for. My mother is a pacifist. I am not. We see the world differently, we operate differently, even though we want the same things. We both want equality and peace. My mother is the sort to talk her way to equality and peace. I'm the sort to talk to the point where I reckon more talk won't do any good, and then smash my way through to an understanding. It is not an enlightened viewpoint I hold. It is a crass, brutish viewpoint — but in a crass, brutish world, I believe my way is the way to go. Mum believes otherwise.

And that's the difference, I think, between us. We live in a world carved by men, where fear and oppression and violence are a part of our lives. I can't even IMAGINE a world sculpted by women, where other values have taken hold. I'm limited in that way. I could try not to be, but I honestly wouldn't know where to start. That's kind of sad, when you think about it. For all my imagination, I can't even imagine that...

... (turns to stare hauntingly out the window). ~ Derek Landy,

268:What’s the most frightening thing to a child? The pain of being the outsider, of looking ridiculous to others, of being teased or picked on in school. Every child burns with fear at the prospect. It’s a primal instinct: to belong. McDonald’s has surely figured this out—along with what specific colors appeal to small children, what textures, and what movies or TV shows are likely to attract them to the gray disks of meat. They feel no compunction harnessing the fears and unarticulated yearnings of small children, and nor shall I. “Ronald has cooties,” I say—every time he shows up on television or out the window of the car. “And you know,” I add, lowering my voice, “he smells bad, too. Kind of like … poo!” (I am, I should say, careful to use the word “alleged” each and every time I make such an assertion, mindful that my urgent whisperings to a two-year-old might be wrongfully construed as libelous.) “If you hug Ronald … can you get cooties?” asks my girl, a look of wide-eyed horror on her face. “Some say … yes,” I reply—not wanting to lie—just in case she should encounter the man at a child’s birthday party someday. It’s a lawyerly answer—but effective. “Some people talk about the smell, too… I’m not saying it rubs off on you or anything—if you get too close to him—but…” I let that hang in the air for a while. “Ewwww!!!” says my daughter. We sit in silence as she considers this, then she asks, “Is it true that if you eat a hamburger at McDonald’s it can make you a ree-tard? I laugh wholeheartedly at this one and give her a hug. I kiss her on the forehead reassuringly. “Ha. Ha. Ha. I don’t know where you get these ideas!” I may or may not have planted that little nugget a few weeks ago, allowing her little friend Tiffany at ballet class to “overhear” it as I pretended to talk on my cell phone. ~ Anthony Bourdain,

269:Along the way, though, I was always careful not to get greedy or to go for the quick buck--despite the temptations in the early days.
Financially, it was hard saying no to big appearance fees from TV shows like I’m a Celebrity…Get Me Out of Here or Survivor--but I always had the long goal in mind and tried to keep the main thing the main thing.
And not get distracted by fluff.
Instead, know your strengths.
I also tended instinctively to shy away from both TV and the whole concept of fame--partly, I am sure, because I didn’t have the self-belief to feel I deserved either fame or money. (Time and experience have since taught me that fame and money very rarely go to the worthy, by the way--hence we shouldn’t ever be too impressed by either of those imposters. Value folk for who they are, how they live, and what they give--that’s a much better benchmark.)
So I resisted TV quite heavily--even ironically spurning the offers of the original Man vs. Wild producer, Rob MacIver, some three times, before finally agreeing to do a pilot show.
But what a dope I was.
Bear, didn’t you listen to your grandma when she wrote: “When the ball rolls your way grab it. We so rarely get a second chance. (Although miraculously, this does sometimes happen, too.)”?
But I just didn’t want to be pushed into TV, I wanted to keep focused on my strengths, and trust those skills.
My father always used to say that if you focus on doing your job well, then money will often follow. But chase the money and it has a habit of slipping through your fingers.
I always liked that.
But learning that I could do both things--TV, as well as my core skills--was a big lesson.
Maybe it would be possible to do programs without having to be a smiley media person.
I wondered.
Grandma?
“Indeed--when the ball rolls your way--grab it. ~ Bear Grylls,

270:7. To Be Brave, You First Must Be Afraid

Being brave isn’t about not feeling scared. Real courage is all about overcoming your fears.

There is little courage involved in setting out on a journey where the destination is certain and every step in between has been mapped in detail. Bravery is about leaving camp in the dark, when we do not know the route ahead and cannot be certain we will ever return.

While I was serving in the military, I suffered a free-fall parachuting accident in Southern Africa, where I broke my back in three places. I then spent 18 months back in the UK, in and out of military rehabilitation, desperately trying to recover. It was the hardest, darkest, most frightening time I had ever known.

Nothing was certain, every movement was agony and my future hung in the balance. No one could tell me whether I would even walk properly again. It had been a jump that had cost me my career, my movement and almost my life. The idea of ever jumping again was almost impossible for me to face.

Yet over seven seasons of Born Survivor and Man Vs Wild, I have since had to jump out of almost every aircraft imaginable: hot-air balloons, military C-130 cargo planes, helicopters, bi-planes, old World War Two Dakotas. You name it: the list is long. And each time it is still hard for me.

I never sleep much the night before, and I have recurring nightmares from my accident, which predictably surface just before a jump. It is a real mountain in my mind, one that induces a dep gnawing fear. Heart racing, sweaty palms, dry throat. But I have to force myself to feel that fear and do it anyway. It is my work.

The crew on the adventure TV shows I have done know that skydiving is hard for me. And I know there will always be a hand that reaches across to my shoulder during the few moments before that plane door opens. The team know I am busy facing demons every time we go up, but it is the job, and I don’t ever want to let my demons win.

Bravery is about facing up to the things we fear the most, and overcoming and conquering those fears…or at least quelling them for a while.

And the greater the fear, the greater the bravery.

But one thing I know for sure: it is only by doing what we fear that we can ever truly learn to be brave. ~ Bear Grylls,

271:CHOOSING CONTENTMENT All that we have comes from God: our spouses, children, families, friends and jobs. That includes our houses, property, furnishings, cars, clothes, family heirlooms and all other personal belongings. God gives us these good gifts for our use and enjoyment. There is nothing wrong with these things, but sometimes our attitudes toward our things can cause problems for us. Throughout history, people have had the desire to get more stuff. But in our culture today, the media shows us how much we don’t have. Because we are exposed to people in different social standings, we can compare what we have to what others have. In previous generations, people compared what they had with their family or neighbors (who probably had similar things); today we have TV shows that portray the lives and belongings of the megarich. When we begin to focus on what others have, we become obsessed with material things. We are tempted to live beyond our means. We become stressed as we work harder and longer in order to buy more stuff. It is easy to wonder why others have more than we do, especially if we’re struggling to keep up with payments on our house, cars and loans. We say, “Other people are just like us, but they have so much more than we do. It’s not fair! Why doesn’t God bless us like he does them? Why should we always have money problems?” Maybe we become upset with our spouse and insist that we should do better than we are doing, or that our children should have the same opportunities that other children have. Jealousy, anger and ambition can eat away at a marriage when we think we should have more than we do. But the stuff we want may not be what God has allotted to us. He has promised that he will provide all that we need but not necessarily all that we want. So one tough spiritual lesson we need to learn as married couples is to shape our wants to match God’s allotment, not the other way around, and to choose, like Paul, to be content whatever our circumstances (see Philippians 4:11). Finding contentment with God’s allotment to us helps ease the stress of getting and spending. It lightens the load of acquiring more and more. And it may help us to grow together as a couple as we learn to enjoy each other’s company without the pressure of reaching for bigger and better toys, vacations, houses or recreational vehicles. When we begin to treasure each other, our hearts will be there also. ~ Anonymous,

272:It all suddenly made me nervous, and a little, tiny, baby bit worried. Pulling one of the stools at the island back, I plopped into it and simply stared at that discolored, harsh face in unease. “I just want to know whether I need to steal a bat or make a phone call.”

His mouth had been open and poised to argue with me… until he heard the last thing I said. “What?”

“I need to know—”

“What do you need to steal a bat for?”

“Well, no one I know owns one, and I can’t go buy one at the store and have it caught on videotape.”

“Videotape?”

Did he know nothing?

“Aiden, come on, if you beat the shit out of someone with a bat, they’re going to look for suspects. Once they have suspects, they’ll look through their things or their purchases. They’ll see I bought one recently and know it was premeditated. Why are you looking at me like that?”

His mauve-colored eyelids went heavy over the bright whites of his eyes, and the expression on his face was filled such a vast range of emotions, one after another after another, that I wasn’t sure which one I was supposed to hold on to. He switched the icepack to the other side of his bruised jaw and shook his head. “The amount you know about committing crimes is terrifying, Van.” His mouth twitched under the rainbow of whatever he was thinking. “It scares the hell out of me, and I don’t get scared easily.”

I snorted, pretty pleased with myself. “Calm down. I went through this phase when I was into watching a lot of crime TV shows. I’ve never even stolen a pen in my life.”

Aiden’s careful expression didn’t go anywhere.

“I’m not trying to kill anyone… unless we had to,” I joked weakly.

His nostrils flared so slightly I almost missed it. But what I didn’t miss was the way the corners of his mouth tipped up into a tiny smile.

I smiled at him as innocently as possible. “So do you want to tell me who’s going to get the fists of fury?” I hoped I sounded as harmless as I intended, even though I felt the exact opposite as every second passed.

“Fists of fury?”

“Yep.” I held up my hands just a little so he could see them. He had no idea the number of fights I’d gotten into with my sisters over the years. I didn’t always win—I rarely won if I was going to be honest—but I never gave up.

The sigh that came out of him was so long and drawn out, I kind of prepped myself for the half-assed answer that was going to come out of his mouth.

“It’s nothing.” There it was ~ Mariana Zapata,

273:You will encounter resentful, sneering non-readers who will look at you from their beery, leery eyes, as they might some form of sub-hominid anomaly, bookimus maximus. You will encounter redditters, youtubers, blogspotters, wordpressers, twitterers, and facebookers with wired-open eyes who will shout at from you from their crazy hectoring mouths about the liberal poison of literature. You will encounter the gamers with their twitching fingers who will look upon you as a character to lock crosshairs on and blow to smithereens. You will encounter the stoners and pill-poppers who will ignore you, and ask you if you have read Jack Keroauc’s On the Road, and if you haven’t, will lecture you for two hours on that novel and refuse to acknowledge any other books written by anyone ever. You will encounter the provincial retirees, who have spent a year reading War & Peace, who strike the attitude that completing that novel is a greater achievement than the thousands of books you have read, even though they lost themselves constantly throughout the book and hated the whole experience. You will encounter the self-obsessed students whose radical interpretations of Agnes Grey and The Idiot are the most important utterance anyone anywhere has ever made with their mouths, while ignoring the thousands of novels you have read. You will encounter the parents and siblings who take every literary reference you make back to the several books they enjoyed reading as a child, and then redirect the conversation to what TV shows they have been watching. You will encounter the teachers and lecturers, for whom any text not on their syllabus is a waste of time, and look upon you as a wayward student in need of their salvation. You will encounter the travellers and backpackers who will take pity on you for wasting your life, then tell you about the Paulo Coelho they read while hostelling across Europe en route to their spiritual pilgrimage to New Delhi. You will encounter the hard-working moaners who will tell you they are too busy working for a living to sit and read all day, and when they come home from a hard day’s toil, they don’t want to sit and read pretentious rubbish. You will encounter the voracious readers who loathe competition, and who will challenge you to a literary duel, rather than engage you in friendly conversation about your latest reading. You will encounter the slack intellectuals who will immediately ask you if you have read Finnegans Wake, and when you say you have, will ask if you if you understood every line, and when you say of course not, will make some point that generally alludes to you being a halfwit. Fuck those fuckers. ~ M J Nicholls,

274:It’s like we've been flung back in time," he said. "Here we are in the Stone Age, knowing all these great things after centuries of progress but what can we do to make life easier for the Stone Agers? Can we make a refrigerator? Can we even explain how it works? What is electricity? What is light? We experience these things every day of our lives but what good does it do if we find ourselves hurled back in time and we can’t even tell people the basic principles much less actually make something that would improve conditions. Name one thing you could make. Could you make a simple wooden match that you could strike on a rock to make a flame? We think we’re so great and modern. Moon landings, artificial hearts. But what if you were hurled into a time warp and came face to face with the ancient Greeks. The Greeks invented trigonometry. They did autopsies and dissections. What could you tell an ancient Greek that he couldn’t say, ‘Big Deal.’ Could you tell him about the atom? Atom is a Greek word. The Greeks knew that the major events in the universe can’t be seen by the eye of man. It’s waves, it’s rays, it’s particles."
“We’re doing all right.”
“We’re sitting in this huge moldy room. It’s like we’re flung back.”
“We have heat, we have light.”
“These are Stone Age things. They had heat and light. They had fire. They rubbed flints together and made sparks. Could you rub flints together? Would you know a flint if you saw one? If a Stone Ager asked you what a nucleotide is, could you tell him? How do we make carbon paper? What is glass? If you came awake tomorrow in the Middle Ages and there was an epidemic raging, what could you do to stop it, knowing what you know about the progress of medicines and diseases? Here it is practically the twenty-first century and you’ve read hundreds of books and magazines and seen a hundred TV shows about science and medicine. Could you tell those people one little crucial thing that might save a million and a half lives?”
“‘Boil your water,’ I’d tell them.”
“Sure. What about ‘Wash behind your ears.’ That’s about as good.”
“I still think we’re doing fairly well. There was no warning. We have food, we have radios.”
“What is a radio? What is the principle of a radio? Go ahead, explain. You’re sitting in the middle of this circle of people. They use pebble tools. They eat grubs. Explain a radio.”
“There’s no mystery. Powerful transmitters send signals. They travel through the air, to be picked up by receivers.”
“They travel through the air. What, like birds? Why not tell them magic? They travel through the air in magic waves. What is a nucleotide? You don’t know, do you? Yet these are the building blocks of life. What good is knowledge if it just floats in the air? It goes from computer to computer. It changes and grows every second of every day. But nobody actually knows anything. ~ Don DeLillo,

275:I watched the light flicker on the limestone walls until Archer said, "I wish we could go to the movies."
I stared at him. "We're in a creepy dungeon. There's a chance I might die in the next few hours. You are going to die in the next few hours. And if you had one wish, it would be to catch a movie?"
He shook his head. "That's not what I meant. I wish we weren't like this. You know, demon, demon-hunter. I wish I'd met you in a normal high school, and taken you on normal dates, and like, carried your books or something." Glancing over at me, he squinted and asked, "Is that a thing humans actually do?"
"Not outside of 1950s TV shows," I told him, reaching up to touch his hair. He wrapped an arm around me and leaned against the wall, pulling me to his chest. I drew my legs up under me and rested my cheek on his collarbone. "So instead of stomping around forests hunting ghouls, you want to go to the movies and school dances."
"Well,maybe we could go on the occasional ghoul hunt," he allowed before pressing a kiss to my temple. "Keep things interesting."
I closed my eyes. "What else would we do if we were regular teenagers?"
"Hmm...let's see.Well,first of all, I'd need to get some kind of job so I could afford to take you on these completely normal dates. Maybe I could stock groceries somewhere."
The image of Archer in a blue apron, putting boxes of Nilla Wafers on a shelf at Walmart was too bizarre to even contemplate, but I went along with it. "We could argue in front of our lockers all dramatically," I said. "That's something I saw a lot at human high schools."
He squeezed me in a quick hug. "Yes! Now that sounds like a good time. And then I could come to your house in the middle of the night and play music really loudly under your window until you took me back."
I chuckled. "You watch too many movies. Ooh, we could be lab partners!"
"Isn't that kind of what we were in Defense?"
"Yeah,but in a normal high school, there would be more science, less kicking each other in the face."
"Nice."
We spent the next few minutes spinning out scenarios like this, including all the sports in which Archer's L'Occhio di Dio skills would come in handy, and starring in school plays.By the time we were done, I was laughing, and I realized that, for just a little while, I'd managed to forget what a huge freaking mess we were in.
Which had probably been the point.
Once our laughter died away, the dread started seeping back in. Still, I tried to joke when I said, "You know, if I do live through this, I'm gonna be covered in funky tattoos like the Vandy. You sure you want to date the Illustrated Woman, even if it's just for a little while?"
He caught my chin and raised my eyes to his. "Trust me," he said softly, "you could have a giant tiger tattooed on your face, and I'd still want to be with you."
"Okay,seriously,enough with the swoony talk," I told him, leaning in closer. "I like snarky, mean Archer."
He grinned. "In that case, shut up, Mercer. ~ Rachel Hawkins,

276:Dear friends and enemies, Season’s greetings! It’s me, Serge! Don’t you just hate these form letters people stuff in Christmas cards? Nothing screams “you’re close to my heart” like a once-a-year Xerox. Plus, all the lame jazz that’s going on in their lives. “Had a great time in Memphis.” “Bobby lost his retainer down a storm drain.” “I think the neighbors are dealing drugs.” But this letter is different. You are special to me. I’m just forced to use a copy machine and gloves because of advancements in forensics. I love those TV shows! Has a whole year already flown by? Much to report! Let’s get to it! Number one: I ended a war. You guessed correct, the War on Christmas! When I first heard about it, I said to Coleman, “That’s just not right! We must enlist!” I rushed to the front lines, running downtown yelling “Merry Christmas” at everyone I saw. And they’re all saying “Merry Christmas” back. Hmmm. That’s odd: Nobody’s stopping us from saying “Merry Christmas.” Then I did some research, and it turns out the real war is against people saying “Happy holidays.” The nerve: trying to be inclusive. So, everyone … Merry Christmas! Happy Hannukah! Good times! Soul Train! Purple mountain majesties! The Pompatus of Love! There. War over. And just before it became a quagmire. Next: Decline of Florida Roundup. —They tore down the Big Bamboo Lounge near Orlando. Where was everybody on that one? —Remember the old “Big Daddy’s” lounges around Florida with the logo of that bearded guy? They’re now Flannery’s or something. —They closed 20,000 Leagues. And opened Buzz Lightyear. I offered to bring my own submarine. Okay, actually threatened, but they only wanted to discuss it in the security office. I’ve been doing a lot of running lately at theme parks. —Here’s a warm-and-fuzzy. Anyone who grew up down here knows this one, and everyone else won’t have any idea what I’m talking about: that schoolyard rumor of the girl bitten by a rattlesnake on the Steeplechase at Pirate’s World (now condos). I’ve started dropping it into all conversations with mixed results. —In John Mellencamp’s megahit “Pink Houses,” the guy compliments his wife’s beauty by saying her face could “stop a clock.” Doesn’t that mean she was butt ugly? Nothing to do with Florida. Just been bugging me. Good news alert! I’ve decided to become a children’s author! Instilling state pride in the youngest residents may be the only way to save the future. The book’s almost finished. I’ve only completed the first page, but the rest just flows after that. It’s called Shrimp Boat Surprise. Coleman asked what the title meant, and I said life is like sailing on one big, happy shrimp boat. He asked what the surprise was, and I said you grow up and learn that life bones you up the ass ten ways to Tuesday. He started reading and asked if a children’s book should have the word “motherfucker” eight times on the first page. I say, absolutely. They’re little kids, after all. If you want a lesson to stick, you have to hammer it home through repetition…In advance: Happy New Year! (Unlike 2008—ouch!) ~ Tim Dorsey,

277:It's hard to form a lasting connection when your permanent address is an eight-inch mailbox in the UPS store.
Still,as I inch my way closer, I can't help the way my breath hitches, the way my insides thrum and swirl. And when he turns,flashing me that slow, languorous smile that's about to make him world famous,his eyes meeting mine when he says, "Hey,Daire-Happy Sweet Sixteen," I can't help but think of the millions of girls who would do just about anything to stand in my pointy blue babouches.
I return the smile, flick a little wave of my hand, then bury it in the side pocket of the olive-green army jacket I always wear. Pretending not to notice the way his gaze roams over me, straying from my waist-length brown hair peeking out from my scarf, to the tie-dyed tank top that clings under my jacket,to the skinny dark denim jeans,all the way down to the brand-new slippers I wear on my feet.
"Nice." He places his foot beside mine, providing me with a view of the his-and-hers version of the very same shoe. Laughing when he adds, "Maybe we can start a trend when we head back to the States.What do you think?"
We.
There is no we.
I know it.He knows it.And it bugs me that he tries to pretend otherwise.
The cameras stopped rolling hours ago, and yet here he is,still playing a role. Acting as though our brief, on-location hookup means something more.
Acting like we won't really end long before our passports are stamped RETURN.
And that's all it takes for those annoyingly soft girly feelings to vanish as quickly as a flame in the rain. Allowing the Daire I know,the Daire I've honed myself to be, to stand in her palce.
"Doubtful." I smirk,kicking his shoe with mine.A little harder then necessary, but then again,he deserves it for thinking I'm lame enough to fall for his act. "So,what do you say-food? I'm dying for one of those beef brochettes,maybe even a sausage one too.Oh-and some fries would be good!"
I make for the food stalls,but Vane has another idea. His hand reaches for mine,fingers entwining until they're laced nice and tight. "In a minute," he says,pulling me so close my hip bumps against his. "I thought we might do something special-in honor of your birthday and all.What do you think about matching tattoos?"
I gape.Surely he's joking.
"Yeah,you know,mehndi. Nothing permanent.Still,I thought it could be kinda cool." He arcs his left brow in his trademark Vane Wick wau,and I have to fight not to frown in return.
Nothing permanent. That's my theme song-my mission statement,if you will. Still,mehndi's not quite the same as a press-on. It has its own life span. One that will linger long after Vane's studio-financed, private jet lifts him high into the sky and right out of my life.
Though I don't mention any of that, instead I just say, "You know the director will kill you if you show up on set tomorrow covered in henna."
Vane shrugs. Shrugs in a way I've seen too many times, on too many young actors before him.He's in full-on star-power mode.Think he's indispensable. That he's the only seventeen-year-old guy with a hint of talent,golden skin, wavy blond hair, and piercing blue eyes that can light up a screen and make the girls (and most of their moms) swoon. It's a dangerous way to see yourself-especially when you make your living in Hollywood. It's the kind of thinking that leads straight to multiple rehab stints, trashy reality TV shows, desperate ghostwritten memoirs, and low-budget movies that go straight to DVD. ~ Alyson Noel,

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