Roger Ebert Quotes
Quotations and aphorisms by Roger Ebert:
If a movie isn't a hit right out of the gate, they drop it. Which means that the whole mainstream Hollywood product has been skewed toward violence and vulgar teen comedy.
~Roger Ebert
Link:
Horror fans are a particular breed. They analyze films with such detail and expertise that I am reminded of the Canadian literary critic Northrup Frye, who approached literature with similar archetypal analysis.
~Roger Ebert
Link:
Dogs notice, they share, they draw conclusions, they like it when they're able to be of service and are touchingly grateful when they're praised.
~Roger Ebert
Link:
'Grand Illusion' and 'Rules of the Game' are routinely included on lists of the greatest films, and deserve to be.
~Roger Ebert
Link:
Many thrillers follow such reliable formulas that you can look at what's happening and guess how much longer a film has to run.
~Roger Ebert
Link:
It is not enough for a movie to be righteous. It must also be watchable.
~Roger Ebert
Link:
I've never found kicks to the groin particularly funny, although recent work in the genre of the buddy movie suggests audience research must prove me wrong.
~Roger Ebert
Link:
If Hollywood stars speak out, so do all sorts of other people. Now Hollywood stars can get a better hearing.
~Roger Ebert
Link:
Anyone who reads advice books about romance has one problem to begin with: bad taste in literature.
~Roger Ebert
Link:
You can't just tell actors, especially young ones, to 'act happy' and expect them to do it. They must in some essential way be happy.
~Roger Ebert
Link:
Many really good films allow us to empathize with other lives.
~Roger Ebert
Link:
Why are some people bullied? Because they are different. How? It doesn't matter.
~Roger Ebert
Link:
We don't have a lot of class-conscious filmmaking.
~Roger Ebert
Link:
Why do alcoholics begin down the same hazardous road day after day? They are in search of that elusive window of well-being that opens when you drink your way out of a hangover and aren't yet drunk all over again. The alcoholic's day consists of trying to keep that window open.
~Roger Ebert
Link:
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
Link:
People never think of themselves as choosing to be politically correct. They simply think in the way that they do.
~Roger Ebert
Link:
I think most people are more susceptible to prejudice than to reason.
~Roger Ebert
Link:
It is hard enough to be good at all, but to be good in comedy speaks for your character.
~Roger Ebert
Link:
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
Link:
In Hollywood, 'under development' means 'all I have is the title.'
~Roger Ebert
Link:
I believe that if, at the end of it all, according to our abilities, we have done something to make others a little happier, and something to make ourselves a little happier, that is about the best we can do.
~Roger Ebert
Link:
One difference between film noir and more straightforward crime pictures is that noir is more open to human flaws and likes to embed them in twisty plot lines.
~Roger Ebert
Link:
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
Link:
In the world of acting, many are thin but few are talented.
~Roger Ebert
Link:
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
Link:
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
Link:
Here's a notion: Peace in the Middle East would come about more easily if the region were governed by women.
~Roger Ebert
Link:
I like smart movies about smart people, and enjoy it when most of the facts are on the table and we can contemplate them together.
~Roger Ebert
Link:
If you can act as if something is true, in a sense that makes it true.
~Roger Ebert
Link:
Teaching prejudice to a child is itself a form of bullying. You've got to be taught to hate.
~Roger Ebert
Link:
I believe that young people wearing hoods, unless they are very young, can be frightening. What are they hiding? Why don't they want to come out into the light with the rest of us? They may be perfectly nice, but the hoods send an uncertain statement.
~Roger Ebert
Link:
It's easier to identify with loss than love, because we have had so much more experience of it.
~Roger Ebert
Link:
We exist to have our wealth moved up the economic chain out of our reach.
~Roger Ebert
Link:
It does seem true that a lot of people will do anything, however humiliating, for fame.
~Roger Ebert
Link:
I do suspect my star ratings average too high. But, of course, star ratings are ridiculous. I'm stuck with them.
~Roger Ebert
Link:
If there's anything I hate more than a stupid action comedy, it's an incompetent stupid action comedy. It's not so bad it's good. It's so bad it's nothing else but bad.
~Roger Ebert
Link:
A lot of people just go to movies that feed into their preexisting and not so noble needs and desires: They just go to action pictures, and things like that.
~Roger Ebert
Link:
The buried code of many American films has become: If I kill you, I have won and you have lost. The instinctive ethical code of traditional Hollywood, the code by which characters like James Stewart, John Wayne and Henry Fonda lived, has been lost.
~Roger Ebert
Link:
Time is what the depressed and panicked lack.
~Roger Ebert
Link:
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
Link:
Sometimes miraculous films come into being, made by people you've never heard of, starring unknown faces, blindsiding you with creative genius.
~Roger Ebert
Link:
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
Link:
There is a part of me that will forever want to be walking under autumn leaves, carrying a briefcase containing the works of Shakespeare and Yeats and a portable chess set. I will pass an old tree under which once on a summer night I lay on the grass with a fragrant young woman and we quoted e.e. cummings back and forth.
~Roger Ebert
Link:
Movies absorb our attention more completely, I think.
~Roger Ebert
Link:
You can have a movie with hardly any cuts, or very few cuts, that is fascinating, you can't take your eyes away from it... Look at some of the long takes in Citizen Kane.
~Roger Ebert
Link:
Who was the real Hitchcock? I interviewed him once and haven't a clue.
~Roger Ebert
Link:
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
Link:
The movies that are made more thoughtfully or made or with more ambition often get just get drowned out by the noise.
~Roger Ebert
Link:
I am utterly bored by celebrity interviews. Most celebrities are devoid of interest.
~Roger Ebert
Link:
What a terrible thing it would be to be the Pope! What unthinkable responsibilities to fall on your shoulders at an advanced age! No privacy. No seclusion. No sin.
~Roger Ebert
Link:
The right really dominates radio, and it's amazing how much energy the right spends telling us that the press is slanted to the left when it really isn't. They want to shut other people up. They really don't understand the First Amendment.
~Roger Ebert
Link:
I think we have to get beyond the idea that we have to categorize people.
~Roger Ebert
Link:
We think of first love as sweet and valuable, a blessed if hazardous condition.
~Roger Ebert
Link:
Samurai films, like westerns, need not be familiar genre stories. They can expand to contain stories of ethical challenges and human tragedy.
~Roger Ebert
Link:
It is quite possible for the vulgar to be funny, but to succeed, it must rise to a certain genius.
~Roger Ebert
Link:
Reese Witherspoon is as cute as a button on Raggedy Ann's overalls, but irresistible raw sex appeal is not one of her qualities.
~Roger Ebert
Link:
Not everyone needs to be slammed into a category and locked there.
~Roger Ebert
Link:
If your religion doesn't respect the rights of other religions, it is lacking something.
~Roger Ebert
Link:
From a dramatic viewpoint, there are few professions that grant their members entry into other lives, high among them cops, doctors, clergymen, journalists and prostitutes. Perhaps that explains why they figure in so much television and cinema. Their lives are lived in the midst of human drama.
~Roger Ebert
Link:
When I am writing, my problems become invisible and I am the same person I always was. All is well. I am as I should be.
~Roger Ebert
Link:
By going to the movies, and because of other things, too, going to college, making a wide variety of friends, moving around traveling, I became a lot more open-minded than the heritage I was born into might have suggested.
~Roger Ebert
Link:
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
Link:
If you find an occupation you love and spend your entire life working at it, is that enough?
~Roger Ebert
Link:
Well, you know what, I'm 60 years old, and I've been interested in politics since I was on my daddy's knee. During the 1948 election, we were praying for Truman. I know a lot about politics.
~Roger Ebert
Link:
That's what fantasies are for, to help us imagine that things are better than they are.
~Roger Ebert
Link:
The Academy is paranoid about its image.
~Roger Ebert
Link:
I don't require movies to be about good people, and I don't reject screen violence.
~Roger Ebert
Link:
We can't help identifying with the protagonist. It's coded in our movie-going DNA.
~Roger Ebert
Link:
In my reviews, I feel it's good to make it clear that I'm not proposing objective truth, but subjective reactions; a review should reflect the immediate experience.
~Roger Ebert
Link:
It's funny that there was so much disturbance about having a Catholic in the White House with Kennedy, and when we finally get a religion in the White House that's causing a lot of conflicts, and concerns, and disturbances for a lot of people, it's in the Bush Administration.
~Roger Ebert
Link:
Parents and schools should place great emphasis on the idea that it is all right to be different. Racism and all the other 'isms' grow from primitive tribalism, the instinctive hostility against those of another tribe, race, religion, nationality, class or whatever. You are a lucky child if your parents taught you to accept diversity.
~Roger Ebert
Link:
It's the same the world over. A Hollywood production comes to town, and the locals all turn movie crazy.
~Roger Ebert
Link:
Class is often invisible in America in the movies, and usually not the subject of the film.
~Roger Ebert
Link:
If a movie is really working, you forget for two hours your Social Security number and where your car is parked. You are having a vicarious experience. You are identifying, in one way or another, with the people on the screen.
~Roger Ebert
Link:
Why is it that English, drama and music teachers are most often recalled as our mentors and inspirations? Maybe because artists are rarely members of the popular crowd.
~Roger Ebert
Link:
There's nothing like impending death to rouse you from existential boredom.
~Roger Ebert
Link:
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
Link:
What happens in a fantasy can be more involving than what happens in life, and thank goodness for that.
~Roger Ebert
Link:
No good movie is too long and no bad movie is short enough.
~Roger Ebert
Link:
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
Link:
Here's how much I know about hockey. Mike Royko and I were in a tiny bar one winter night, and the radio kept reporting goals by the Blackhawks. I mentioned how frequently the team was scoring. 'You're listening to the highlights,' Royko observed.
~Roger Ebert
Link:
We are the playthings of the gods.
~Roger Ebert
Link:
A film is a terrible thing to waste.
~Roger Ebert
Link:
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
Link:
I remember when a Coke came in a six-ounce bottle, and delicious it was. Now it comes in sizes so big that I question how the human bladder can deal with the intake.
~Roger Ebert
Link:
To die is one thing. How much worse to know that all the life that ever existed on this planet, and all it ever achieved, was to be obliterated?
~Roger Ebert
Link:
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
Link:
I begin to feel like most Americans don't understand the First Amendment, don't understand the idea of freedom of speech, and don't understand that it's the responsibility of the citizen to speak out.
~Roger Ebert
Link:
And I think both the left and the right should celebrate people who have different opinions, and disagree with them, and argue with them, and differ with them, but don't just try to shut them up.
~Roger Ebert
Link:
Nothing ever seems straightforward in Venice, least of all its romances.
~Roger Ebert
Link:
Catholic theology believes that God gave man free will, and you can't give somebody free will and then send in a play from the sidelines.
~Roger Ebert
Link:
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
Link:
Movies that encourage empathy are more effective than those that objectify problems.
~Roger Ebert
Link:
It often strikes me that the actors in high school movies look too old.
~Roger Ebert
Link:
Growing up, I missed the whole 'Three Stooges' thing. Either they weren't on the station in my hometown, or we hadn't bought a TV set yet, or they came to town too late for me. I'm pretty sure that at the right age, I would have loved them.
~Roger Ebert
Link:
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
Link:
I'm told we movie critics praise movies that are long and boring.
~Roger Ebert
Link:
Clouds do not really look like camels or sailing ships or castles in the sky. They are simply a natural process at work. So too, perhaps, are our lives.
~Roger Ebert
Link:
Your intellect may be confused, but your emotions will never lie to you.
~Roger Ebert
Link:
James Cameron's films have always been distinguished by ground-breaking technical excellence.
~Roger Ebert
Link:
'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
Link:
Sarah Palin lacked the preparation or temperament to be one heartbeat away from the presidency, but what she possessed in abundance was the ability to inflame political passions and energize the John McCain campaign with star quality.
~Roger Ebert
Link:
Because I don't give the studios advanced quotes or an advanced look at my reviews. I think the readers deserve to read my reviews before the studios do.
~Roger Ebert
Link:
Most of us do not consciously look at movies.
~Roger Ebert
Link:
Life is made up of challenges that cannot be solved but only accepted.
~Roger Ebert
Link:
All but a very few of us are in debt. We exist as entities who borrow money and spend the rest of our lives making interest payments on a debt tally that never seems to budge. Whatever wealth we have, in labor, property or cash, is suctioned to the top.
~Roger Ebert
Link:
Nobody looks perfect. We have to find peace with the way we look and get on with life.
~Roger Ebert
Link:
But the fact is, most people are not going to be rich someday.
~Roger Ebert
Link:
It is reckless to make broad generalizations about any group of people.
~Roger Ebert
Link:
The idea that a book can advise a woman how to capture a man is touchingly naive. Books advising men how to capture a woman are far less common, perhaps because few men are willing to admit to such a difficulty. For both sexes, I recommend a good novel, offering scenarios you might learn from, if only because they reflect a lot of doubt.
~Roger Ebert
Link:
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
Link:
Sometimes it's all about the casting.
~Roger Ebert
Link:
I begin to feel like I was in the last generation of Americans who took a civics class.
~Roger Ebert
Link:
I'm kind of glad the web is sort of totally anarchic. That's fine with me.
~Roger Ebert
Link:
It's not often a thriller keeps me wound up as well as 'Headhunters' did. I knew I was being manipulated and didn't care. It was a pleasure to see how well it was being done.
~Roger Ebert
Link:
My motto: 'No good movie is depressing. All bad movies are depressing.'
~Roger Ebert
Link:
Every great film should seem new every time you see it.
~Roger Ebert
Link:
All over the web there are some very good critics and it's become for people who are interested. It's become a very good way to get to reviews and involve yourself in discussions.
~Roger Ebert
Link:
It is universally agreed that Jean Renoir was one of the greatest of all directors, and he was also one of the warmest and most entertaining.
~Roger Ebert
Link:
It's rare to find a film that goes for broke and says, 'To hell with the consequences.'
~Roger Ebert
Link:
Lebanon was at one time known as a nation that rose above sectarian hatred; Beirut was known as the Paris of the Middle East. All of that was blown apart by senseless religious wars, financed and exploited in part by those who sought power and wealth. If women had been in charge, would they have been more sensible? It's a theory.
~Roger Ebert
Link:
I don't think Bush was legitimately elected President.
~Roger Ebert
Link:
To make others less happy is a crime. To make ourselves unhappy is where all crime starts. We must try to contribute joy to the world. That is true no matter what our problems, our health, our circumstances. We must try. I didn't always know this, and am happy I lived long enough to find it out.
~Roger Ebert
Link:
We can now have action movies with two stars where one might be African American and one might be Asian American. One of them doesn't have to be white, and the other one doesn't have to be the ethnic sidekick. We're way over that. And I think it's happening in society, too.
~Roger Ebert
Link:
' The Lucky One' is at its heart a romance novel, elevated however by Nicholas Sparks' persuasive storytelling. Readers don't read his books because they're true, but because they ought to be true.
~Roger Ebert
Link:
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
Link:
I was perfectly content before I was born, and I think of death as the same state. What I am grateful for is the gift of intelligence, and for life, love, wonder, and laughter. You can't say it wasn't interesting. My lifetime's memories are what I have brought home from the trip.
~Roger Ebert
Link:
Blockbusters run the mainstream industry. We may never again have a decade like the 1970s, when directors were able to find such freedom.
~Roger Ebert
Link:
One of the weapons Marvel used in its climb to comic-book dominance was a willingness to invent new characters at a dizzying speed. There are so many Marvel universes, indeed, that some superheroes do not even exist in one another's worlds, preventing gridlock.
~Roger Ebert
Link:
Are vampires kinky? I didn't know.
~Roger Ebert
Link:
Share:
Permalink:
Browse: