Top 70 Roger Ebert Quotes

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.

If Hollywood stars speak out, so do all sorts of other people. Now Hollywood stars can get a better hearing.

It is quite possible for the vulgar to be funny, but to succeed, it must rise to a certain genius.

Class is often invisible in America in the movies, and usually not the subject of the film.

James Cameron‘s films have always been distinguished by ground-breaking technical excellence.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

‘Grand Illusion‘ and ‘Rules of the Game‘ are routinely included on lists of the greatest films, and deserve to be.

A film is a terrible thing to waste.

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.

I think most people are more susceptible to prejudice than to reason.

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.

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?

But the fact is, most people are not going to be rich someday.

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.

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.

We can’t help identifying with the protagonist. It’s coded in our movie-going DNA.

Many really good films allow us to empathize with other lives.

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.

Teaching prejudice to a child is itself a form of bullying. You’ve got to be taught to hate.

I don’t think Bush was legitimately elected President.

Most of us do not consciously look at movies.

Nothing ever seems straightforward in Venice, least of all its romances.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It often strikes me that the actors in high school movies look too old.

People never think of themselves as choosing to be politically correct. They simply think in the way that they do.

Movies that encourage empathy are more effective than those that objectify problems.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It is reckless to make broad generalizations about any group of people.

‘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.

I think we have to get beyond the idea that we have to categorize people.

I don’t require movies to be about good people, and I don’t reject screen violence.

What happens in a fantasy can be more involving than what happens in life, and thank goodness for that.

Your intellect may be confused, but your emotions will never lie to you.

I begin to feel like I was in the last generation of Americans who took a civics class.

Movies absorb our attention more completely, I think.

Nobody looks perfect. We have to find peace with the way we look and get on with life.

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.

I’m kind of glad the web is sort of totally anarchic. That’s fine with me.

Are vampires kinky? I didn’t know.

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.

Life is made up of challenges that cannot be solved but only accepted.

Sometimes it’s all about the casting.

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.

Every great film should seem new every time you see it.

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.

We don’t have a lot of class-conscious filmmaking.

That’s what fantasies are for, to help us imagine that things are better than they are.

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.

My motto: ‘No good movie is depressing. All bad movies are depressing.’

It is not enough for a movie to be righteous. It must also be watchable.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It does seem true that a lot of people will do anything, however humiliating, for fame.

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.

Not everyone needs to be slammed into a category and locked there.

There’s nothing like impending death to rouse you from existential boredom.