QUOTES ABOUT TELEVISION

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.

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.

Robin, a mother really loves her children only if she loves them enough to let go. I didn't have children as annuities against loneliness in my old age. They were part of my youth—the wonderful thing I had with your father. Now they must have their youth and their children.

The Catholic faith gives such hope and solace to its followers as they seek salvation through a litany of shalts and shalt nots, but compassion for our fellows is a quality that requires little knowledge and is, I thin, the true redemption, after all.

Assuming TV really did rot their brains, how would they be in a position to know? Its intrinsic biases—toward flash over illumination, sound bites over substance, the methods of advertising over the methods of persuasion—have become their basic intuitions. When subjective evaluation fails, objective measures must be consulted, and the most glaring objective consequence of the boomers’ embrace of mass culture has been the death of both folk culture and high culture. … During the cold war, the Communist leaders of the Eastern bloc did their best to keep pop culture out of their countries, because they believed that Western entertainment would put their children in thrall to decadent bourgeois values—and they were right.