Top 100 Roger Ebert Quotes
#1. I'd rather be called a N*gger than a Slave.
Roger Ebert
#2. If you have to ask what it symbolizes, it didn't.
Roger Ebert
#3. Wes Anderson's mind must be an exciting place for a story idea to be born. It immediately becomes more than a series of events and is transformed into a world with its own rules, in which everything is driven by emotions and desires as convincing as they are magical.
Roger Ebert
#4. The screenplay is so well-written in a scruffy, fanzine way that you want to rub noses in it - the noses of those zombie writers who take 'screenwriting' classes that teach them the formulas for 'hit films.'
Roger Ebert
#5. It is human nature to look away from illness. We don't enjoy a reminder of our own fragile mortality. That's why writing on the Internet has become a life-saver for me. My ability to think and write have not been affected. And on the Web, my real voice finds expression.
Roger Ebert
#6. Films like Fargo are why I love the movies.
Roger Ebert
#7. No matter what they're charging to get in, it's worth more to get out.
Roger Ebert
#8. Beguiled by George S. Bush's easy smile and casual indifference to the details, we are on the brink of electing him to office. This isn't choosing a president, it's casting the lead in a sitcom about the presidency.
Roger Ebert
#9. What makes people interesting is the spirit that shines through.
Roger Ebert
#10. I know it is coming, and I do not fear it, because I believe there is nothing on the other side of death to fear
Roger Ebert
#11. In thinking about 'depressing movies,' many people don't realize that all bad movies are depressing, and no good movies are.
Roger Ebert
#12. The layout was griping, the glide is awesome. Two ten-inch fins up, way up.
Roger Ebert
#13. Valentines Day is being marketed as a Date Movie. I think its more of a First-Date Movie. If your date likes it, do not date that person again. And if you like it, there may not be a second date.
Roger Ebert
#14. 3-D is a waste of a perfectly good dimension. Hollywood's current crazy stampede toward it is suicidal. It adds nothing essential to the moviegoing experience. For some, it is an annoying distraction. For others, it creates nausea and headaches.
Roger Ebert
#15. The problem with being sure that God is on your side is that you can't change your mind, because God sure isn't going to change His.
Roger Ebert
#16. There must be a better reason to have a baby than to provide a plot point in a rom-com. Don't you think?
Roger Ebert
#17. Ridley Scott's 'Prometheus' is a magnificent science-fiction film, all the more intriguing because it raises questions about the origin of human life and doesn't have the answers.
Roger Ebert
#18. I felt it would to add a great deal to my legend for eccentricity.
Roger Ebert
#19. Occasionally an unsuspecting innocent will stumble into a movie like this and send me an anguished postcard, asking how I could possibly give a favorable review to such trash. My stock response is Ebert's Law, which reads: A movie is not about what it is about. It is about how it is about it.
Roger Ebert
#20. As the man says in the play, for this relief, much thanks.
Roger Ebert
#21. But considering that I walked in expecting no complexity at all, let alone the visual wonderments, 'Snow White and the Huntsman' is a considerable experience.
Roger Ebert
#22. There are often lists of the great living male movie stars. How often do you see the name of Nicolas Cage? He should always be up there. He's daring and fearless in his choice of roles, and unafraid to crawl out on a limb, saw it off and remain suspended in air.
Roger Ebert
#23. I know as a critic I'm required to have a well-armored heart. I must be a cynical wise guy to show my great sophistication. No pushover, me.
Roger Ebert
#24. There are few lonelier sights than a good comedian being funny in a movie that doesn't know what funny is.
Roger Ebert
#25. [Orson Welles] was a man who made the greatest film ever made and was never forgiven for it.
Roger Ebert
#26. Film theory has nothing to do with film.
Roger Ebert
#27. Families and their problems go on and on, and they aren't solved, they're dealt with.
Roger Ebert
#28. Cinema, for me, has always been something like music composed with photographic images.
Roger Ebert
#29. I will one day be thin, but Vincent Gallo will always be the director of The Brown Bunny.
Roger Ebert
#30. Last year, I reviewed a nine-hour documentary about the lives of Mongolian yak herdsmen, and I would rather see it again than sit through The Frighteners.
Roger Ebert
#31. The Golden Thumb is not as good as the Oscar, but it is a lot of fun.
Roger Ebert
#32. When we're discussing who to invite to a dinner party, my wife Chaz and I sometimes use the shorthand, 'good value for money,' which indicates guests expected to be entertaining.
Roger Ebert
#33. A few actresses have all but set up shop as women of a certain age who attract younger lovers. I think of Susan Sarandon, Cameron Diaz and Isabelle Huppert.
Roger Ebert
#34. On this ancient and miraculous world, where such beautiful natural and living things have evolved, something has gone wrong when life itself is used as a manufacturing process.
Roger Ebert
#35. Dogs remember every favor you ever do for them and store those events in a memory bank titled Why My Human Is A God.
Roger Ebert
#36. The ability of an audience to enter into the narrative arc of a movie is being lost; do today's audiences have the patience to wait for Harry Lime in The Third Man?
Roger Ebert
#37. All I know is, it is better to be the whale than the squid.
Roger Ebert
#38. Life always has an unhappy ending, but you can have a lot of fun along the way, and everything doesn't have to be dripping in deep significance.
Roger Ebert
#39. The Last Airbender is an agonizing experience in every category I can think of and others still waiting to be invented.
Roger Ebert
#40. It amazes me that filmmakers will still film, and audiences will still watch, relationships so bankrupt of human feeling that the characters could be reading dialogue written by a computer.
Roger Ebert
#41. 'Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter' is without a doubt the best film we are ever likely to see on the subject - unless there is a sequel, which is unlikely, because at the end, the Lincolns are on their way to the theater.
Roger Ebert
#42. Of what use is freedom of speech to those who fear to offend?
Roger Ebert
#43. If you can act as if something is true, in a sense that makes it true.
Roger Ebert
#44. No movie has ever been able to provide a catharsis for the Holocaust, and I suspect none will ever be able to provide one for 9/11. Such subjects overwhelm art.
Roger Ebert
#45. I've been told that I am evil. I've been told that I am behind the persecution of millions of Americans. That I have encouraged hate toward gays. I've received both very brief and obscene messages, and very long and literate messages that tell me a vote for Crash was vote for homophobia.
Roger Ebert
#46. I have always had my doubts about any form of divine intervention in sports contests. The power of prayer may be remarkable in many other arenas, but why should God want my team to win instead of the other side? Isn't it insulting to request God to even take an interest in baseball?
Roger Ebert
#47. Aren't you getting tired of people hating one another? What do they think they get out of it?
Roger Ebert
#48. Anyone who reads advice books about romance has one problem to begin with: bad taste in literature.
Roger Ebert
#49. It's a good question, because a movie isn't good or bad based on its politics. It's usually good or bad for other reasons, though you might agree or disagree with its politics.
Roger Ebert
#50. It's rare to find a film that goes for broke and says, 'To hell with the consequences.'
Roger Ebert
#51. I'll tell you, I think that the Internet has provided an enormous boost to film criticism by giving people an opportunity to self publish or to find sites that are friendly.
Roger Ebert
#52. Open-heart surgery is now part of a typical life experience for many people. Folks talk casually about 'having a stent put in,' as if they had their tires rotated.
Roger Ebert
#53. One hopeful sign that the filmmakers can learn and grow is that the sequel does not contain a single pie, if you know what I mean.
Roger Ebert
#54. There's nothing like impending death to rouse you from existential boredom.
Roger Ebert
#55. If you plan to miss this movie, better miss it quickly; I doubt if it'll be around to miss for long.
Roger Ebert
#56. Why has Scandinavia been producing such good thrillers? Maybe because their filmmakers can't afford millions for CGI and must rely on cheaper elements like, you know, stories and characters.
Roger Ebert
#57. I think that probably the - I don't give quotes to studios. They have to get those out of the paper or from television. So they wouldn't have had my quote opening day.
Roger Ebert
#58. They're not trying to prevent Hollywood from making movies. They're asking that the most powerful image-building machinery in the world stop grinding out killer dykes and twisted homo sex fiends as if sexual orientation had anything to do with criminal behavior.
Roger Ebert
#60. I find that when I am actually writing, I enter a zone of concentration too small to admit my troubles.
Roger Ebert
#61. 'Marley' does what is probably the best possible job of documenting an important life.
Roger Ebert
#62. The Academy is paranoid about its image.
Roger Ebert
#63. I'm told we movie critics praise movies that are long and boring.
Roger Ebert
#64. Who wants to live in the present? It's such a limiting period compared to the past.
Roger Ebert
#65. When I go to a great movie, I can live somebody else's life a little bit for a while. I can walk in somebody else's shoes. I can see what it feels like to be a member of a different gender, a different race, a different economic class, to live in a different time, to have a different belief.
Roger Ebert
#66. Improvisation is a weird word because we often think it means that you make things up out of whole cloth right there on the spot, and that's rarely the case in acting. You have to know who the character is, what the situation is and what is needed.
Roger Ebert
#67. A lot of first novels are written long before they're actually put down on paper.
Roger Ebert
#68. There's something depressing about a young couple helplessly in love. Their state is so perfect, it must be doomed. They project such qualities on their lover that only disappointment can follow.
Roger Ebert
#69. Most of us do not consciously look at movies.
Roger Ebert
#70. Jacques Tati is the great philosophical tinkerer of comedy, taking meticulous care to arrange his films so that they unfold in a series of revelations and effortless delights.
Roger Ebert
#71. Films to the degree that they glorify mindlessness and short attention span they are bad, to the degree that they encourage empathy with people not like ourselves and encourage us to think about life, they are good.
Roger Ebert
#72. All good art is about something deeper than it admits.
Roger Ebert
#73. And the sexes eyeing each other uneasily, for nothing is easier for a teenager to imagine than rejection.
Roger Ebert
#74. [D]oes the real world have any more substance than visions and hallucinations when we're having them? At any given moment, what's happening in our minds is all and everything that happens.
Roger Ebert
#75. It's not what a movie is about, it's how it is about it.
Roger Ebert
#76. It's easier to identify with loss than love, because we have had so much more experience of it.
Roger Ebert
#77. It is quite possible for the vulgar to be funny, but to succeed, it must rise to a certain genius.
Roger Ebert
#78. It's like the high school production of something you saw at Steppenwolf, with the most gifted students in drama class playing the John Malkovich and Joan Allen roles.
Roger Ebert
#79. Start. Don't look back. If at the end it doesn't meet your hopes, start again. Now you know more about your hopes.
Roger Ebert
#81. I don't require movies to be about good people, and I don't reject screen violence.
Roger Ebert
#82. Skateboarding is forever, and things like college and girls only ruin an endlessly savored adolescence.
Roger Ebert
#83. Going to a movie so you won't be offended is like eating potato chips made with Olestra; you avoid the dangers of the real thing, but your insides fill up with synthetic runny stuff.
Roger Ebert
#84. We are put on this planet only once, and to limit ourselves to the familiar is a crime against our minds.
Roger Ebert
#85. Anyone who has the price of a newspaper should have a fair chance of understanding most of what's written in it,
Roger Ebert
#86. I'm kind of glad the web is sort of totally anarchic. That's fine with me.
Roger Ebert
#87. I have been here before, I am here now, I will be here again.
Roger Ebert
#88. One sign of a great actor is when he can be alone by himself on the screen, doing almost nothing, and producing one of a film's defining moments.
Roger Ebert
#89. Just write, get better, keep writing, keep getting better. It's the only thing you can control.
Roger Ebert
#90. Steven Spielberg makes Minority Report with the newest digital technology; other directors seem to be trying to make their movies from it.
Roger Ebert
#91. It's the worst kind of bad film: the kind that gets you all worked up and then lets you down, instead of just being lousy from the first shot.
Roger Ebert
#92. There are no guarantees. But there is also nothing to fear. We come from oblivion when we are born. We return to oblivion when we die. The astonishing thing is this period of in-between.
Roger Ebert
#94. Socrates told us, "the unexamined life is not worth living." I think he's calling for curiosity, more than knowledge. In every human society at all times and at all levels, the curious are at the leading edge.
Roger Ebert
#95. Of all the purposes of education, I think the most useful is this: It prepares you to keep yourself entertained. It gives you a better chance of an interesting job.
Roger Ebert
#96. Troy is based on the epic poem The Iliad by Homer , according to the credits. Homer's estate should sue.
Roger Ebert
#97. I began to realize that I had tended to avoid some people because of my instant conclusions about who they were and what they would have to say. I discovered that everyone, speaking honestly and openly, had important things to tell me.
Roger Ebert
#98. Films are no longer concerned with the silence of God, but with the chattering of men.
Roger Ebert
#99. Because we can engineer genetics, because we can telecast real lives-of course we must, right? But are these good things to do? The irony is, the people who will finally answer that question will be the very ones produced by the process.
Roger Ebert
#100. Now I see that all relationships are virtual, even those that take place in person. Whether we use our bodies or a keyboard, it all comes down to two minds crying out from their solitude.
Roger Ebert
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