The television industry doesn't like to see the compexity of the world. It prefers simple reporting, with simple ideas: this is white, that's black; this is good, that's bad.

I have no problem being with people of different nationalities.

Someone knocks at the door of an apartment to borrow salt or sugar, people run into each other in the elevator, and in this way become inscribed in the spectator's memory.

We're always looking at this love through the eyes of the person who is suffering because of this love.

To tell you the truth, in my work, love is always in opposition to the elements. It creates dilemmas. It brings in suffering. We can't live with it, and we can't live without it. You'll rarely find a happy ending in my work.

The television industry doesn't like to see the compexity of the world. It prefers simple reporting, with simple ideas: this is white, that's black; this is good, that's bad.

Of course I'd like to get beyond the concrete. But it's really difficult. Very difficult.

Maybe it is worth investigating the unknown, if only because the very feeling of not knowing is a painful one.

In real life, there are names that surprise us because they don't seem to suit the person at all.

For me optimism is two lovers walking into the sunset arm in arm. Or maybe into the sunrise - whatever appeals to you.

There are mysteries, secret zones in each individual.

In believing too much in rationality, our contemporaries have lost something.

Do people really want liberty, equality, fraternity? Is it not some manner of speaking?

Different people in different parts of the world can be thinking the same thoughts at the same time. It's an obsession of mine: that different people in different places are thinking the same thing but for different reasons. I try to make films which connect people.

Documentaries deal with people who live real, everyday lives. But if these people trusted us and told us the truth about their lives, it could be used against them - which sometimes happened.

I believe the life of every person is worthy of scrutiny, containing its own secrets and dramas.

I have one good characteristic: I'm a pessimist, so I always imagine the worst - always. To me, the future is a black hole.

I like chance meetings - life is full of them. Every day, without realising it, I pass people whom I should know.

I really don't know anything about music, and it's no great experience for me. But I do think that music has a purifying element.

I was happy when I got into film school. I'd simply satisfied my ambition to show them that I could get in - nothing else - although I do believe they shouldn't have accepted me. I was a complete idiot. I can't understand why they took me. Probably because I'd tried three times.

If I have a goal, then it is to escape from this literalism. I'll never achieve it; in the same way that I'll never manage to describe what really dwells within my character, although I keep on trying.

In believing too much in rationality our contemporaries have lost something.

The realm of superstitions, fortune-telling, presentiments, intuition, dreams, all this is the inner life of a human being, and all this is the hardest thing to film.

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.

I've always just gone with the best role, and I don't care if it's in theater, film or television.

Bill Hanna and I owe an awful lot to television, but we both got our start and built the first phase of our partnership in the movies.

Roger King is, without a doubt, the greatest salesman in the history of anything. And I don't ever limit him just to television. He could sell you anything.

People talk about that catch and, I've said this many times, that I've made better catches than that many times in regular season. But of course in my time, you didn't have a lot of television during the regular season. A lot of people didn't see me do a lot of things.