QUOTES ABOUT TELEVISION

If you can't run, you crawl. If you can't crawl-- you find someone to carry you.

Americans no longer talk to each other, they entertain each other. They do not exchange ideas, they exchange images. They do not argue with propositions; they argue with good looks, celebrities and commercials.

Saturday morning was their unrestricted television time, and they usually took advantage of it to watch a series of cartoon shows that would certainly have been impossible before the discovery of LSD.

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.

I feel guilty because for a long time I didn't allow myself a television, and I used to drop that fact in conversation to impress people. I thought it made me sound dignified. A couple of years ago, however, I visited a church in the suburbs and there was this blowhard preacher talking about how television rots your brain. He said that when we are watching television our minds are working no harder than when we are sleeping. I thought that sounded heavenly. I bought one that afternoon.