"I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book."
— Groucho Marx

"If everyone demanded peace instead of another television set, then there'd be peace."
— John Lennon

"People love a happy ending. So every episode, I will explain once again that I don't like people. And then Mal will shoot someone. Someone we like. And their puppy."
— Joss Whedon

"Every day's a negotiation and sometimes it's done with guns."
— Joss Whedon

"Watching television is like taking black spray paint to your third eye."
— Bill Hicks

"If a man watches three football games in a row, he should be declared legally dead."
— Erma Bombeck

"On Friday night, I was reading my new book, but my brain got tired, so I decided to watch some television instead."
— Stephen Chbosky (The Perks of Being a Wallflower)

"Seeing a murder on television... can help work off one's antagonisms. And if you haven't any antagonisms, the commercials will give you some."
— Alfred Hitchcock

"If television's a babysitter, the Internet is a drunk librarian who won't shut up."
— Dorothy Gambrell (Cat and Girl Volume I)

"Reading, for me, is like this: consumptive, pleasing, calming, as much as edifying. It's how I feel after a good dinner. That's why I do it so often: It feels wonderful. The book is mind and I insert myself into it, cover it entire, ear my way through every last slash and dot. That's something you can do with a book, unlike television or movies or the Internet. You can eat it, or mark it, like a dog does on a hydrant. "
— Tara Bray Smith

"I was about 12 years old and I was sitting watching the television and it was some kind of talent show, you know, and on marches this monkey, this ape, in a pair of red-checked trousers with a little matching jacket holding a ukelele and it started jigging around playing it, and it was looking straight into the camera, straight at me, and I remember thinking, that's it, that'll be me, you know, that'll be me."
— Nick Cave

"An intellectual snob is someone who can listen to the William Tell Overture and not think of The Lone Ranger. "
— Dan Rather

"Do you know we are being led to
Slaughters by placid admirals

& that fat slow generals are getting
Obscene on young blood

Do you know we are ruled by t.v.
"
— Jim Morrison (Jim Morrison's an American Prayer)

"If we were to do the Second Coming of Christ in color for a full hour, there would be a considerable number of stations which would decline to carry it on the grounds that a Western or a quiz show would be more profitable."
— Edward R. Murrow

"I haven't had a TV in 10 years, and I really don't miss it. 'Cause it's always so much more fun to be with people than it ever was to be with a television."
— Chuck Palahniuk

"Most people gaze neither into the past nor the future; they explore neither truth nor lies. They gaze at the television."
— Radiohead

"I cannot tell you how many quiet mornings I have spent sitting around hotel rooms and furnished apartments in the United States and Mexico, smoking cigarettes, plunking the guitar, and watching Perry Mason--telling myself, "Well, at least I don't have a day job. And there is nothing wrong with that. I am not guilty of anything. Perry would see that in a minute.""
— Dave Hickey (Air Guitar: Essays on Art & Democracy)

"For those whose ganglia were formed pre-TV, the mimetic deployment of pop-culture icons seems at best an annoying tic and at worst a dangerous vapidity that compromises fiction's seriousness by dating it out of the Platonic Always, where it ought to reside."
— Jonathan Lethem

"...and he just sat back and stared at the tube, almost interested in what was happening, trying to find the ability to believe in that lie so he could believe the one within."
— Hubert Selby Jr. (Requiem for a Dream)

"Anyone who watches even the slightest amount of TV is familiar with the scene: An agent knocks on the door of some seemingly ordinary home or office. The door opens, and the person holding the knob is asked to identify himself. The agent then says, "I'm going to ask you to come with me."
— David Sedaris (Me Talk Pretty One Day)

"I spent my time drinking and staring at a television in the airport bar. More death and destruction. Crime. Pollution. All the news stories were telling me to be frightened. All the commercials were telling me to buy things I didn´t need. The message was that people could only be passive victims or consumers."
— John Twelve Hawks (The Traveler)

"Kill your television!"
— Paul Thomas Anderson (Magnolia: The Shooting Script)

"The first time I see a jogger smiling, I'll consider it."
— Joan Rivers

"'I'm the idiot box. I'm the TV. I'm the all-seeing eye and the world of the cathode ray. I'm the boob tube. I'm the little shrine the family gathers to adore.'

'You're the television? Or someone in the television?'

'The TV's the altar. I'm what people are sacrificing to.'

'What do they sacrifice?' asked Shadow.

'Their time, mostly,' said Lucy. 'Sometimes each other.' She raised two fingers, blew imaginary gunsmoke from the tips. Then she winked, a big old I Love Lucy wink.

'You're a God?' said Shadow.

Lucy smirked, and took a ladylike puff of her cigarette. 'You could say that,' she said."
— Neil Gaiman (American Gods)

"And make no mistake: irony tyrannizes us. The reason why our pervasive cultural irony is at once so powerful and so unsatisfying is that an ironist is impossible to pin down. All U.S. irony is based on an implicit "I don’t really mean what I’m saying." So what does irony as a cultural norm mean to say? That it’s impossible to mean what you say? That maybe it’s too bad it’s impossible, but wake up and smell the coffee already? Most likely, I think, today’s irony ends up saying: "How totally banal of you to ask what I really mean."
— Wallace, David Foster

"Television screens saturated with commercials promote the utopian and childish idea that all problems have fast, simple, and technological solutions. You must banish from your mind the naive but commonplace notion that commercials are about products. They are about products in the same sense that the story of Jonah is about the anatomy of whales. "
— Neil Postman

"We are in the same tent as the clowns and the freaks-that's show business."
— Edward R. Murrow

"Television is the soma of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World."
— Robert MacNeil

"Television characters live inside our minds as though they're actual people. In fact, we know more about them than we do about most people in our physical lives."
— Neal Pollack

"The television image sanctified, conferred identity. The more familiar the face, the more to be trusted. "
— P.D. James (Innocent Blood)

"Maybe I should write a "reality" novel. It'll be like a "reality" television show, only much more annoying and unforgettable."
— Brad Listi

"As far as I know there's no climate of cultural criticism directed at the fridge"
— John Hartley