Paddy Chayefsky Quotes

The first dead man on Omaha Beach must be a sailor!

Howard Beale is processed, instant God, and right now it looks like he might just go over bigger than Mary Tyler Moore.

Television will do anything for a rating... anything!

Television is not the truth. Television is a goddamned amusement park.

You're not such a dog as you think you are.

You don't send a man to his death because you want a hero.

This was the story of Howard Beale: The first known instance of a man who was killed because he had lousy ratings.

I'm not sentimental about war. I see nothing noble in widows.

You British plundered half the world for your own profit. Let's not pass it off as the Age of Enlightenment.

Television is the menace that everyone loves to hate but can't seem to live without.

Don't think of it as art, think of it as work.

I'm a human being, god-dammit. My life has value!

I'm not a great writer. I'm a great rewriter.

God save us from people who do the morally right thing. It's always the rest of us who get broken in half.

Television is democracy at its ugliest.

Americans don’t want drama, especially good drama, they just want their boredom killed.

The best thing that can happen is for the theme to be nice and clear from the beginning.

The worst kind of censorship is the kind that takes place in your own mind before you sit down to a typewriter.