Top 385 Quotes & Sayings by Roger Ebert - Page 6

The purpose of civilization and growth is to be able to reach out and empathize with other people... For me, the movies are like a machine that generates empathy.

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.

It amazes me that filmmakers will still film, and audiences will still watch, relationships so bankrupt of human feeling that the characters could be reading dialogue written by a computer.

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.

The ability of so many people to live comfortably with the idea of capital punishment is perhaps a clue to how so many Europeans were able to live with the idea of the Holocaust: Once you accept the notion that the state has the right to kill someone and the right to define what is a capital crime, aren't you halfway there?

Much has been written about Generation X and the films about it. Clerks is so utterly authentic that its heroes have never heard of their generation. When they think of "X," it's on the way to the video store.

A truly strong woman will choose a stong man who disagrees with her over a weak one who goes along.

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

Film theory has nothing to do with film. Students presumably hope to find out something about film, and all they will find out is an occult and arcane language designed only for the purpose of excluding those who have not mastered it and giving academic rewards to those who have. No one with any literacy, taste or intelligence would want to teach these courses, so the bona fide definition of people teaching them are people who are incapable of teaching anything else.

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.

Steve Coogan picks up enough to lecture an interviewer: This is a postmodern novel before there was any modernism to be post about. Later it's claimed that Tristram Shandy was No. 8 on the Observer's list of the greatest novels, which cheers everyone until they discover the list was chronological.

Some of these people make my skin crawl.

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.

Resentment is just a way of letting someone else use your mind rent-free.

What we have here is a rousing boy's adventure story, adapted from stories that Edgar Rice Burroughs cranked out for early pulp magazines. They lacked the visceral appeal of his Tarzan stories, which inspired an estimated 89 movies; amazingly, this is the first John Carter movie, but it is intended to foster a franchise and will probably succeed.

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.

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

I felt it would to add a great deal to my legend for eccentricity.

I urgently advise hospitals: Do not make the DVD available to your patients; there may be an outbreak of bedpans thrown at TV screens.

Matthew McConaughey and Kate Hudson star. I neglected to mention that, maybe because I was trying to place them in this review's version of the Witness Protection Program. If I were taken off the movie beat and assigned to cover the interior design of bowling alleys, I would have some idea of how they must have felt as they made this film.

The screenplay is so well-written in a scruffy, fanzine way that you want to rub noses in it - the noses of those zombie writers who take 'screenwriting' classes that teach them the formulas for 'hit films.'

Who wants to live in the present? It's such a limiting period compared to the past.

Valentines Day is being marketed as a Date Movie. I think its more of a First-Date Movie. If your date likes it, do not date that person again. And if you like it, there may not be a second date.

If you want to save yourself the ticket price, go into the kitchen, cue up a male choir singing the music of hell, and get a kid to start banging pots and pans together. Then close your eyes and use your imagination.

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

To call "A Lot like Love" dead in the water is an insult to water.

I stopped taking notes on my Palm Pilot and started playing the little chess game.

'Marley' does what is probably the best possible job of documenting an important life.

Vincent Gallo has put a curse on my colon and a hex on my prostate. He called me a 'fat pig' in the New York Post and told the New York Observer I have 'the physique of a slave-trader.' He is angry at me because I said his 'The Brown Bunny' was the worst movie in the history of the Cannes Film Festival... it is true that I am fat, but one day I will be thin, and he will still be the director of 'The Brown Bunny.'

What makes people interesting is the spirit that shines through.

[Marlon] Brando was the only guy who could step out of that shadow at the end of that movie and be worth the wait.

Improvisation is a weird word because we often think it means that you make things up out of whole cloth right there on the spot, and that's rarely the case in acting. You have to know who the character is, what the situation is and what is needed.

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. But if you go to foreign films, if you go to documentaries, if you go to independent films, if you go to good films, you will become a better person because you will understand human nature better. Movies record human nature in a better way than any other art form, that's for sure.

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.

Nicholas Sparks recently went on record as saying he is a greater novelist than Cormac McCarthy. This is true in the same sense that I am a better novelist than William Shakespeare.

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

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

(Guy) Pearce, as the hero, makes the mistake of trying to give a good and realistic performance. (Jeremy) Irons at least knows what kind of movie he's in, and hams it up accordingly.

Mad Dog Time is the first movie I have seen that does not improve on the sight of a blank screen viewed for the same length of time. Oh, I've seen bad movies before. But they usually made me care about how bad they were. Watching Mad Dog Time is like waiting for the bus in a city where you're not sure they have a bus line.

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.

The Bucket List is a movie about two old codgers who are nothing like people, both suffering from cancer that is nothing like cancer, and setting off on adventures that are nothing like possible. I urgently advise hospitals: Do not make the DVD available to your patients; there may be an outbreak of bedpans thrown at TV screens.

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.

Skateboarding is forever, and things like college and girls only ruin an endlessly savored adolescence.

Fight Club is a thrill ride masquerading as philosophy - the kind of ride where some people puke and others can't wait to get on again.

The time in between my clapping is ma. If you just have non-stop action with no breathing space at all, it's just busyness, But if you take a moment, then the tension building in the film can grow into a wider dimension. If you just have constant tension at 80 degrees all the time you just get numb.

My favorite love scenes in movies don't involve passion, they involve nobility or sacrifice.

Marlon Brando is the most influential movie actor of the century.

I just assume I'm right. Partially out of conviction and partially as a pose.

In the world of bad movies, 'Death to Smoochy' is a towering achievement.

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

We live in a box of space and time. Movies are windows in its walls.

I wear a pedometer, a little device that counts every step. It works as a goad, because you walk additional distances to pile up the numbers. The average person walks 2,000 to 3,000 steps a day. I walk 10,000 steps a day. I have lost a lot of weight as a result.

Beguiled by George S. Bush's easy smile and casual indifference to the details, we are on the brink of electing him to office. This isn't choosing a president, it's casting the lead in a sitcom about the presidency.

Movies are like a machine that generates empathy.

What in the world is a leave of presence? It means I am not going away.

Film theory has nothing to do with film.

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

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.

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

The Last Airbender is an agonizing experience in every category I can think of and others still waiting to be invented. The laws of chance suggest that something should have gone right. Not here. It puts a nail in the coffin of low-rent 3D, but it will need a lot more coffins than that.