Source: Checker and the Derailleurs
“Television and the media are everywhere and they are taking over so powerfully. They don't shut up for a second. So you are unable to think.”
Terry Gilliam's flying circus (2006)
Context: I am quite bored nowadays. I don't know if it's age and the fact that I have seen so many things and am less surprised, or whether the problem is truly the content. But things have been repeating themselves for 30-40 years already. It seems to me that there is no desire to push the envelope or even to peek there. People are afraid. In the 1960s and 1970s we pushed the limits farther. More attention was paid to what was going on around.
Television and the media are everywhere and they are taking over so powerfully. They don't shut up for a second. So you are unable to think. It is very difficult to think independently when you are surrounded by all that noise. What I most aspire to is to be alone. Not lonely, but alone. To stop all this noise. That is what I do when I go to Umbria. There is no television there, no telephone.
The situation is especially serious with television. The money is dispersed among hundreds of stations so that no money is left for good things. In our time there was far greater depth. Not everything is artificial and as cheap as possible. Everyone gossips on television; it's all so trivial and it's impossible to hear anything.
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Terry Gilliam 21
American-born British screenwriter, film director, animator… 1940Related quotes
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Context: Here's a story: There was a documentary filmmaker who was making a documentary film about education in America. And he's shooting across this classroom with lots of people, kids, who are completely distracted at the television in the back of the classroom. When they get back to the editing room, they realize that on the television, you can barely make out the show for two seconds; it's "The Simpsons," Homer Simpson on the screen. So they call up Matt Groening, who was a friend of the documentary filmmaker, and say, you know, Is this going to be a problem? It's only a couple seconds. Matt says, No, no, no, it's not going to be a problem, call so and so. So they called so and so, and so and so said call so and so.
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Potterism (1921) p.196. https://books.google.com/books?id=9tDSm2WzQxsC&pg=PA196
Context: Jane: What do you think of his book Arthur?
Gideon: I don't think of it. I've had no reason to, particularly. I've not had to review it.... I'm afraid I'm hopeless about novels just now, that's the fact. I'm sick of the form—slices of life served up cold in three hundred pages. Oh, it's very nice; it makes nice reading for people. But what's the use? Except, of course, to kill time for those who prefer it dead. But as things in themselves, as art, they've been ruined by excess. My critical sense is blunted just now. I can hardly feel the difference, though I can see it, between a good novel and a bad one. I couldn't write one, good or bad, to save my life, I know that. And I've got to the stage when I wish other people wouldn't. I wish everyone would shut up, so that we could hear ourselves think...
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