Roger Ebert Quotes

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

~ Roger Ebert

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.

~ Roger Ebert

Dear Bill (O'Reilly)...I am concerned that you have been losing touch with reality recently. Did you really say you are more powerful than any politician?That reminds me of the famous story about Squeaky the Chicago Mouse. It seems that Squeaky was floating on his back along the Chicago River one day. Approaching the Michigan Avenue lift bridge, he called out: Raise the bridge! I have an erection!

~ Roger Ebert

Gene [Siskel] often mentioned something François Truffaut once told him: the most beautiful sight in a movie theater is to walk down to the front, turn around, and look at the light from the screen reflected on the upturned faces of the members of the audience.

~ Roger Ebert

Never marry someone who doesn’t love the movies you love. Sooner or later, that person will not love you.

~ Roger Ebert

Sometimes two people will regard each other over a gulf too wide to ever be bridged, and know immediately what could have happened, and that it never will.

~ Roger Ebert

We laugh, that we may not cry.

~ Roger Ebert

I may appear to suffer from some sort of compulsive repetition syndrome, but these rituals are important to me. I have many places where I sit and think, “I have been here before, I am here now, and I will be here again.” Sometimes, lost in reverie, I remember myself approaching across the same green, or down the same footpath, in 1962 or 1983, or many other times. Sometimes Chaz comes along on my rituals, but just as often I go alone. Sometimes Chaz will say she’s going shopping, or visiting a friend, or just staying in the room and reading in bed. “Why don’t you go and touch your bases?” she’ll ask me. I know she sympathizes. These secret visits are a way for me to measure the wheel of the years and my passage through life. Sometimes on this voyage through life we need to sit on the deck and regard the waves.

~ Roger Ebert

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 artistic importance as a visual experience, I accept. But for most gamers, video games represent a loss of those precious hours we have available to make ourselves more cultured, civilized and empathetic.

~ Roger Ebert

Aren't you getting tired of people hating one another? What do they think they get out of it?

~ Roger Ebert

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.

~ 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

I believe empathy is the most essential quality of civilization.

~ Roger Ebert

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

~ Roger Ebert

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.

~ Roger Ebert

One, don’t wait for inspiration, just start the damned thing. Two, once you begin, keep on until the end. How do you know how the story should begin until you find out where it’s going?

~ Roger Ebert

You can't say it wasn't interesting.

~ Roger Ebert

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

~ Roger Ebert

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

~ Roger Ebert

No matter what they're charging to get in, it's worth more to get out.

~ Roger Ebert

The sad thing is that when movies like this fail, executives think that proves there's no audience for unusual, original pictures - because they think they've made one.

~ Roger Ebert

All I require of a religion is that it be tolerant of those who do not agree with it.

~ Roger Ebert

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

~ Roger Ebert

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

~ Roger Ebert

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

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

~ 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

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

~ Roger Ebert

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

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

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

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

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

~ Roger Ebert

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

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

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

~ Roger Ebert

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

Most of us do not consciously look at movies.

~ Roger Ebert

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

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