Roger Ebert Quotes

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

How quickly do we grow accustomed to wonders.

I am reminded of the Isaac Asimov story Nightfall, about the planet where the stars were visible only once in a thousand years. So awesome was the sight that it drove men mad. We who can see the stars every night glance up casually at the cosmos and then quickly down again, searching for a Dairy Queen.

I lost faith in the Oscars the first year I was a movie critic - the year that Bonnie and Clyde didn't win.

I believe empathy is the most essential quality of civilization.

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.

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

What every human being should do is eat a vegetarian diet based on whole foods.

Period. That's it. Animal protein is bad for you. Dairy is bad for you. Forget the ads: Milk and eggs are bad for you.

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

All I know is, it is better to be the whale than the squid.

I do not fear death. 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.

I have no fear of death. We all die. I consider my remaining days to be like money in the bank. When it is all gone, I will be repossessed.

If there's one thing I've learned in this life, it's that you never say no to an old gypsy woman with a blind eye and leprous fingernails.

Life's missed opportunities, at the end, may seem more poignant to us than those we embraced — because in our imagination they have a perfection that reality can never rival.

Doing research on the Web is like using a library assembled piecemeal by pack rats and vandalized nightly.

Kindness’ covers all of my political beliefs.

It is more erotic to wonder if you're about to be kissed than it is to be kissed.

Going to see Godzilla at the Palais of the Cannes Film Festival is like attending a satanic ritual in St. Peter's Basilica.

The Muse visits during the process of creation, not before.

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

And the parrots of talk radio are just sending out the same stuff. When I look at my e-mails, I see the same Limbaugh rhetoric; apparently, people don't have any ideas of their own. And there's just this drumroll of anti-progressive thought.

Because of the rush of human knowledge, because of the digital revolution, I have a voice, and I do not need to scream.

A young girl is possessed by a devil, and Constantine shouts, 'I need a mirror! Now! At least three feet high!' He can capture the demon in the mirror and throw it out the window, see, although you wonder why supernatural beings would have such low-tech security holes.

Of what use is freedom of speech to those who fear to offend?

The very fact of snow is such an amazement.

Rollerball is an incoherent mess, a jumble of footage in search of plot, meaning, rhythm and sense. There are bright colors and quick movement on the screen, which we can watch as a visual pattern that, in entertainment value, falls somewhere between a kaleidoscope and a lava lamp.

"Dirty Love" wasn't written and directed, it was committed. Here is a film so pitiful, it doesn't rise to the level of badness. It is hopelessly incompetent... I am not certain that anyone involved has ever seen a movie, or knows what one is.

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.

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.

It is human nature to look away from illness. We don't enjoy a reminder of our own fragile mortality.

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.

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.

Someone once said the fundamental reason we get married is because have a universal human need for a witness.

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

I am not a believer, not an atheist, not an agnostic. I am still awake at night, asking how? I am more content with the question than I would be with an answer.

An honest bookstore would post the following sign above its 'self-help' section: 'For true self-help, please visit our philosophy, literature, history and science sections, find yourself a good book, read it, and think about it.

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.

There are two things you can't argue in film: comedy and eroticism. If something doesn't make you laugh, no one can tell you why it's funny, and it's difficult to reason someone out of an erection.

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

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.

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.

Sometimes miraculous films come into being, made by people you've never heard of, starring unknown faces, blindsiding you with creative genius.

Some movies run off the rails. This one is like the train crash in The Fugitive. I watched it in mounting gloom, realizing I was witnessing something historic, a film that for decades to come will be the punch line of jokes about bad movies.

Film has become a marketed commodity, and the opportunities and audiences for art cinema have grown smaller. There is a general downturn in cultural literacy, perhaps because of television.

While I am usually in despair when a movie abandons its plot for a third act given over entirely to action, I have no problem with the way Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets ends, because it has been pointing toward this ending, hinting about it, preparing us for it, all the way through. What a glorious movie.

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.

The movie cheerfully offends all civilized notions of taste, decorum, manners and hygiene... The movie is vulgar? Vulgarity is when we don't laugh. When we laugh, it's merely human nature.

We must try to contribute joy to the world. That is true no matter what our problems, our health, our circumstances. We must try.

When I had been a film critic for ten minutes, I treated Doris Day as a target for cheap shots. I have learned enough to say today that the woman was remarkably gifted.

An actress should never, ever, be asked to run beside a van in red disco boots for more than about half a block, and then only if her child is being kidnapped.

This sucks on so many levels." Dialogue from "Jason X" Rare for a movie to so frankly describe itself. "Jason X" sucks on the levels of storytelling, character development, suspense, special effects, originality, punctuation, neatness and aptness of thought.