Entertainment Shift Quotes

I've always been funny, but I never considered it as a particular career path until my early 30s, when I realized that hip-hop wasn't going to be the long term.

There was a time in the 1930s when magazine writers could actually make a good living. 'The Saturday Evening Post' and 'Collier's' both had three stories in each issue. These were usually entertaining, and people really went for them. But then television came along, and now of course, information technology... the new way of killing time.

I used to watch TV in the days that I was on TV. But in that time, streaming has come along. So I can honestly say, I have no idea what's on real-time TV.

Television has shied away from being too dark, because so much has happened to us recently here in the West, and people are sort of wanting to see more uplifting sorts of things.

I converted a family-owned strip club into an improvisational acting theater.

Everything will be seen on your computer or BlackBerry or whatever devices we will be seeing in the future. Comedians will put their content on whatever server and send it to you specifically. We may even lose the live performance.

When I was doing theatre in Mumbai, actors won't come because they had television. For many years, I did theatre religiously and in Mumbai, I saw people disrespecting it and it hurt me very badly.

The Internet has changed everything. People will be discovered online. People buy music online. It's a completely different way to get entertainment.

I think comedy has evolved like every art form, and people probably do less standing around and telling jokes, and more things that have to do with reality.

If you had told me in the Seventies and Eighties that TV would be as edgy or edgier than most films, and more intelligently written than most films, I wouldn't have believed it. There's great stuff out there.

Television has usurped everybody from film. And so have commercials, by the way.

Hollywood no longer offers entertainment. Instead, activism has replaced acting, and sermons have supplanted stories. Instead of a good yarn, you get a yawn.

That's what I think musicals will come to. No backstage stories, nothing of that sort.

I like how TV used to be - 'Boys from the Blackstuff' and 'Play for Today', instead of 'Stars in Your Eyes' and 'Celebrity Come Cook With Me' or whatever. I hate all that stuff.

When you have kids, you don't really watch TV anymore, and when I do, I binge-watch box sets of 'Breaking Bad.'

I grew up in the day when the Beatles sold 1 million singles in a week. And all you've got to do now is sell about 10,000 singles and you're in the charts.

My favorite television show has changed throughout the years. I used to think 'Married... With Children' was really funny. But now that I've gotten older, it's 'The Golden Girls,' believe it or not. That shows kills me.

Somewhere along the line, a concert became a variety show. It was no longer enough for four dudes to play together in front of some guitar amps. Costume changes, an army of dancers, and Broadway theatrics suddenly became standard for a 'concert.'

When I make a movie, I don't do any shows because the focus is completely on the film but when I take up a show, it's an absolute relief!

The way that we're consuming what we watch. Netflix, binge-watching, destination agnostic were not terms. It was about networks, times, dates. Even with feature films, you had to see it this way, in this capacity, at this time. All that has changed. Now it's really about the story. It's a gift that I became a storyteller at this time.

Reality TV has totally destroyed soap operas. They're gone. They used to be the biggest thing in the world - they're gone.

It's a different world now: Stars come and go quickly, and there are so many of them. I read a statistic that all the record companies combined used to put out around 3,000 albums in a year. Now they put out something like 30,000!

If you had ever told me that the finest film work was going to be done on television, I wouldn't have believed it.

People are doing sitcoms on stage rather than theater. You go to the theater, and it's as if you were watching a sitcom at 8:30 on Channel 4.

Fantasy is, of course, booming, and I think it's beginning to stretch its range as well.