There was only so much television you could do.

But the working I would always want to do.

So I felt, well, I'll make the money and, with the money, do what I want to do.

From that, I became very anxious to produce something of my own.

They had to start shaving my chin when I was 12 years old because light started to pick it up.

They kept me in short pants as long as they could, until they were shaving the hair on my legs because it was beginning to photograph.

If it's boring, then it's tiring.

I never say too much about that in public interviews, because it disappoints the public to tell them you're not that crazy about a property you did that possibly they liked.

So then you have to say to yourself: Do I want to be rich, or do I want to do good work?

Well, they just don't know anything else except that one form of their business, acting, and they don't really want to learn any other part of it, or they would. Directing and producing and putting a show together is very creative, for me.

I would also like to act, once in a while, but not get up every morning at 5:30 or six o'clock and pound into the studio and get home at 7:30 or eight o'clock at night, or act over and over and over every night on Broadway, either.

People like Spencer Tracy held up because they had the background originally, but to this day they never have changed Mr. Gable's role, or most of them.

I remember Mr. Mayer very well. He sort of liked to be the father - no, he liked to be treated like you thought he was Daddy, but he didn't treat you like Daddy at all.

They thought in terms of: whatever you had that started you at the box office, this was it.

So I'm in that half-hour business where the most money is, so that eventually I feel like the people that put on the Dupont show, like maybe my artistic effort is going to be a little different.

The studio didn't ask them to learn their trade, they just worked them, and when that personality or that gimmick or whatever they had ran dry at the box office, they were dropped and out.

There was never any effort made out there to improve the artist.

But I want to do good work, after this series.

There was only so much television you could do.

To me, the series was the end of the actor, when the series ended.

So whatever I might have started to learn at that age was all undone by the next director and next crew in the next cheap picture, because I was allowed to get away with murder.

So if I keep making mistakes on Broadway or tape or film, producing, directing or acting, I can go along and do it - so long as I'm not investing too much capital in these things.

I just knew how to do the one thing I did, and whether I did it well or not depended on who the director was.

A nice, steady job I don't need that bad. I'm not that satisfied with it.

A lot of people like to run in plays because it's a nice, steady job.

In those days, even as a boy, I watched some people that I knew were living way beyond their means.

I hope this series is good work, but it is in the half-hour medium, which is limited to a kind of mediocrity that sponsors are just dying to have right now, and the public, for some reason, is unconsciously demanding.

Fortunately, I happened to go east at a time when live television was centered in New York.

I'm not up on today's television for children, because it's mostly cartoons that don't seem to interest me.

The young people look great on television. They're youthful and have a lot of zip and energy, but when you see them live, they can only do about 20 minutes because they haven't got the training to hold an audience for an hour and a half or so.

At the University of Maryland, my first year I started off planning to major in art because I was interested in theatre design, stage design or television design.

It's about the power of design and the power of the human spirit. It's above paying anybody to do something stupid for money like reality television does - like ambushing people.

Baseball hasn't been the national pastime for many years now - no sport is. The national pastime, like it or not, is watching television.

Networks decide who will have a chance to do shows, but it is the viewers who make the final decision of who stays and who goes. I am very fortunate, in that the television viewers of our country have decided that Bob Barker can stay.

Twin Peaks was special because it was so groundbreaking. In the early '90s it really changed television a lot. A bunch of weird shows, like Northern Exposure, came on after that.

We're just dealing with the kind of warp and woof of television ratings.

I did I Love My Wife on Broadway in 1978, and then went into television land. Now things are starting to come together in the way I thought they might when I was a kid.

I think what we need is a more welcoming mode from the people who put on a hundred million country-western shows on television. How about a monthly jazz show?

Television is a device that permits people who haven't anything to do to watch people who can't do anything.

I've directed a fair amount of television series - so I'm always trying to learn new things. One episode was all hand-held and I'm trying to get better at when you should do things and when you should just shut up and watch what the people are saying.

Television's Mr. Filth: that's me.

I'd really been wanting to do a television series. I was looking for a comedy.

It gets kinda monotonous, but that's television. There are plus sides and down sides. The positive side is that you have steady work for nine months of the year for however many years your show is on TV,.

Without television and mass communication, that knowledge wouldn't exist. So I think it actually has the possibility of turning people into more understanding and more empathetic people.

It is a significant acknowledgment that the way people are watching television is changing and the model is quickly changing.

If there's anything unsettling to the stomach, it's watching actors on television talk about their personal lives.

Very often some of the religious miracle plays you see on television can be very corny, I find. And so simplistic.

I'm very wary of news on television.

Kennedy did not have to run the risk of having his ideas and his words shortened and adulterated by a correspondent. This was the television era, not only in campaigning, but in holding the presidency.