Roger Ebert Quotes

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

We laugh, that we may not cry.

To my knowledge, no one in or out of the field has ever been able to cite a game worthy of comparison with the great dramatists, poets, filmmakers, novelists and composers. That a game can aspire to a...

Most of us do not consciously look at movies.

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.

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 conc...

If your religion doesn't respect the rights of other religions, it is lacking something.

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 like smart movies about smart people, and enjoy it when most of the facts are on the table and we can contemplate them together.

On Hayao MiyazakiI told Miyazaki I love the "gratuitous motion" in his films; instead of every movement being dictated by the story, sometimes people will just sit for a moment, or they will sigh, or...

The movies that are made more thoughtfully or made or with more ambition often get just get drowned out by the noise.

A depressing number of people seem to process everything literally. They are to wit as a blind man is to a forest, able to find every tree, but each one coming as a surprise.

We feel the same emotions for our ideas as we do for the real world, which is why we can cry while reading a book, or fall in love with movie stars.

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...

How quickly 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 th...

So much of what happens by chance forms what becomes your life.

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

It's not what a movie is about, it's how it is about it.

I believe empathy is the most essential quality of civilization.

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