“The television replaced the sound of conversation that was missing from my grandparents' lives.”

“Much of the conversation in the country consisted of lines from television shows, both past and present.”

“I was very young and lived with my grandparents in a villa with white walls in the Calle Ocharan, in Miraflores.”

“If watching television doesn't hasten death, it surely manages to make death very inviting; for television so shamelessly sentimentalizes and romanticizes death that it makes the living feel they have missed something - just by staying alive.”

“I feel guilty because for a long time I didn't allow myself a television, and I used to drop that fact in conversation to impress people. I thought it made me sound dignified. A couple of years ago, however, I visited a church in the suburbs and there was this blowhard preacher talking about how television rots your brain. He said that when we are watching television our minds are working no harder than when we are sleeping. I thought that sounded heavenly. I bought one that afternoon.”

“You never know what you're missing when you run away from a conversation.”