Influence of Media Quotes

You're basically the sum of all the experiences you've ever had, and they're sort of shaken up in you and reproduced in the things you create, and that includes seeing movies.

I had a somewhat religious upbringing. Not strict, but it was there, and I'm kind of thankful for that. If you grow up just watching MTV, that's its own form of religion, and it's not even based on happiness or communal responsibility. I mean, try to construct a worldview out of that.

Mainly people—they’re just misinformed, or they are too busy, they’re trying to get their kids to school, they’re working, they just don’t have enough information, or they’re not professionals at sorting out all the information that’s out there, and so our political process gets skewed. But if you guys give them good information, their instincts are good and they will make good decisions. And the president has the bully pulpit to give them good information.

People ask 'do you make a conscious effort not to swear?' - if you're doing silly stuff you're not tempted to put swearing in. All the comics from my childhood, who were funny without swearing, were the people that influenced me. What I do is quite traditional anyway.

Women will do anything Oprah Winfrey says, and that is why we can't have women voting.

Like their parents, kids flock to see James Bond and Derek Flint movies - outrageously antiheroic heroes who break all the taboos, making attractive the very things the kids are told they shouldn't do themselves.

I can't negate the theory that the Huxtables on 'The Cosby Show' may have helped pave the way for the Obama family. People enjoyed watching that black family.

My oldest brother was a big influence on the films I watched as a kid.

All the faults of the age come from Christianity and journalism. Christianity, of course, but why journalism?

I'm not a singer, so I reproduce a little bit what I see on television and what I listen to on the radio. I don't have self-control, really, so I didn't want to sing like Mariah Carey.

You see, the power of television cannot be underestimated.

Americans who have travelled and who have English friends know we are not necessarily all baddies, but I think that seeing us being so incessantly nasty on screen has a drip, drip, drip effect on the rest of them.

I remember in high school thinking that I wanted to be a lawyer, and now I realize I saw that movie 'And Justice for All' when I was a kid and thought, 'That's what lawyers do, and I want to get up and yell and scream in the middle of a courtroom.'

With the stroke of a pen the political cartoonist can affect public policy.

The idea that people are incapable of making up their own minds about people is something that Obama and his party live with every day.

You're not actually being a good actor all the time. But people refer to me as a good actor because they read it someplace, not because they've made up their own mind. So I'm very lucky!

Our experience is coloured through and through by books and plays and the cinema, and it takes patience and skill to disentangle the things we have really learned from life for ourselves.

One of my biggest fears when I see really bad people on T.V. is that I don't know how they got there.

I love radio! I think radio, done right, can have more influence and have a greater connection with people and be more deeply meaningful than another medium like TV, which is on all the time and you're paying attention to it half the time.

These censorship people think something is going to promote behavior in people.

The media can be an instrument of change. It can maintain the status quo and reflect the views of the society or it can, hopefully, awaken people and change minds. I think it depends on who’s piloting the plane.

You live by the media, you live by the polls, you've got to suffer by the polls, too.

I think that people might watch reality television or what they see played out on media outlets and get ideas. We might be more anesthetized to divorce or bad behavior now because of what we see on television or on postings on TMZ. So it definitely could be filtering in to how we conduct ourselves.

Those rosy memories we all share are actually memories from our favorite TV shows. We've confused our own childhoods with episodes of "Ozzie and Harriet," "Father Knows Best," and "The Brady Bunch." In real life, Ozzie had a very visible mistress for years, Bud and Kitten on "Father Knows Best" grew up to become major druggies, and Mom on "The Brady Bunch" dated her fifteen-year-old fictional son.

Without 'The Brady Bunch,' my guess is I would have become an engineer working on new plastics or something.