Roger Ebert Quotes

282 Sourced Quotes

A corner is important. It provides privacy and an anchor and lets you exist independently of the room.

Roger Ebert
It's the kind of movie where you ask people how they liked it, and they say, "Well, it was well made," and then they wince.

Roger Ebert
And yet, even so, there is a way to find happiness. That is to be curious about all of the interlocking events that add up to our lives. To notice connections. To be amused or perhaps frightened by the ways things work out. If the universe is indifferent, what a consolation that we are not.

Roger Ebert
Herzog by his example gave me a model for the film artist: fearless, driven by his subjects, indifferent to commercial considerations, trusting his audience to follow him anywhere. In the 38 years since I saw my first Herzog film, after an outpouring of some 50 features and documentaries, he has never created a single film that is compromised, shameful, made for pragmatic reasons or uninteresting. Even his failures are spectacular.

Roger Ebert
I know aliens from other worlds are required to arrive in New Mexico, but why stay there?

Roger Ebert
Art is the closest we can come to understanding how a stranger really feels.

Roger Ebert
As I swim through the summer tide of vulgarity, I find that's what I'm looking for: Movies that at least feel affection for their characters. Raunchy is OK. Cruel is not.

Roger Ebert
I have discovered a goodness and decency in people as exhibited in all the letters, e-mails, flowers, gifts and prayers that have been directed my way. I am overwhelmed and humbled. I offer you my most sincere thanks and my deep and abiding gratitude. If I ever write my memoirs, I have some spellbinding material. How does the Joni Mitchell song go? "Don't it always seem to go that you don't know what you've got till it's gone"? One thing I've discovered is that I love my job more than I thought I did, and I love my wife even more!

Roger Ebert
They say baseball is popular because everyone thinks they can play it. Similar reasoning may explain the popularity of the Olsen twins: Teenage girls love them because they believe they could be them. What, after all, do Mary-Kate and Ashley do in New York Minute that could not be done by any reasonably presentable female adolescent? Their careers are founded not on what they do, but on the vicarious identification of their fans, who enjoy seeing two girls making millions for doing what just about anybody could do.

Roger Ebert
Jane Austen wrote six of the most beloved novels in the English language, we are informed at the end of Becoming Jane, and so she did. The key word is beloved. Her admirers do not analyze her books so much as they just plain love them to pieces.

Roger Ebert
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
If there is such a thing as a lock on an Oscar nomination,... Hoffman has one.

Roger Ebert
Families and their problems go on and on, and they aren't solved, they're dealt with.

Roger Ebert
It's hard to explain the fun to be found in seeing the right kind of bad movie.

Roger Ebert
My books are a subject of much discussion. They pour from shelves onto tables, chairs and the floor, and Chaz observes that I haven't read many of them and I never will. You just never know. One day I may - need is the word I use - to read Finnegans Wake, the Icelandic sagas, Churchill's history of the Second World War, the complete Tintin in French, 47 novels by Simenon, and By Love Possessed.

Roger Ebert
I'm told we movie critics praise movies that are long and boring.

Roger Ebert
I value the kind of prayer when you stand at the edge of the sea, or beneath a tree, or smell a flower, or love someone, or do a good thing. Those prayers validate existence and snatch it away from meaningless routine.

Roger Ebert
If you pay attention to the movies they will tell you what people desire and fear. Movies are hardly ever about what they seem to be about. Look at a movie that a lot of people love, and you will find something profound, no matter how silly the film may be.

Roger Ebert
One of the most sublime and hazardous moments in human experience comes when two people lock eyes and realize that they are sexually attracted to one another. They may not act on the knowledge.They may file it away for future reference. They may deny it. They may never see each other again. But the moment has happened, and for an instant all other considerations are insignificant.

Roger Ebert
I find that when I am actually writing, I enter a zone of concentration too small to admit my troubles.

Roger Ebert
When I write, I fall into the zone many writers, painters, musicians, athletes, and craftsmen of all sorts seem to share: In doing something I enjoy and am expert at, deliberate thought falls aside and it is all just THERE. I think of the next word no more than the composer thinks of the next note.

Roger Ebert
Yes, I was fat, but I dealt with it by simply never thinking about it. It is useful, when you are fat, to have a lot of other things to think about.

Roger Ebert
A lot of first novels are written long before they're actually put down on paper.

Roger Ebert
Fellini was more in love with breasts than Russ Meyer, more wracked with guilt than Ingmar Bergman, more of a flamboyant showman than Busby Berkeley... Amarcord seems almost to flow from the camera, as anecdotes will flow from one who has told them often and knows they work. This was the last of his films made for no better reason than Fellini wanted to make it.

Roger Ebert
When I go to the movies, one of my strongest desires is to be shown something new. I want to go to new places, meet new people, have new experiences. When I see Hollywood formulas mindlessly repeated, a little something dies inside of me: I have lost two hours to boors who insist on telling me stories I have heard before.

Roger Ebert
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
And the sexes eyeing each other uneasily, for nothing is easier for a teenager to imagine than rejection.

Roger Ebert
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
What's sad about not eating is the experience, whether at a family reunion or at midnight by yourself in a greasy spoon under the L tracks. The loss of dining, not the loss of food.

Roger Ebert
It is comforting to think that we can love so powerfully that fate itself wheels and turns at the command of our souls.

Roger Ebert