Top 100 Harold Ramis Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “I never work just to work. It’s some combination of laziness and self-respect.”

— Harold Ramis

2. “I’m terrified beyond the capacity for rational thought.”

— Harold Ramis

3. “Life doesn’t care about your vision. You just gotta roll with it.”

— Harold Ramis

4. “I collect spores, molds, and fungus.”

— Harold Ramis

5. “Find the most talented person in the room and if it’s not you, go stand next to him. Hang out with him. try to be helpful.”

— Harold Ramis

6. “Nothing reinforces a professional relationship more than enjoying success with someone.”

— Harold Ramis

7. “Everyone has experienced laughing at a funeral, and not even inappropriately. It could be a response to a moment of absurdity or some fond memory. We’re human beings so we understand that laughter and crying aren’t always disparate emotions.”

— Harold Ramis

8. “A psychologist said to me, there are only two important questions you have to ask yourself. What do you really feel? And, what do you really want? If you can answer those two, you probably can leave your neuroses behind you.”

— Harold Ramis

9. “There’s a great rabbinical motto that says you start each day with a note in each pocket. One note says, “The world was created for you today,” and the other note says, “I’m a speck of dust in a meaningless universe,” and you have to balance both things.”

— Harold Ramis

10. “How one handles success or failure is determined by their early childhood.”

— Harold Ramis

11. “I’m sure that the liability for doing a tracheotomy would be tremendous. You make one mistake, and it’s over. Most doctors won’t even do it.”

— Harold Ramis

12. “I think satire is a luxury of literate middle-class people. People who are well fed and relatively secure in their beds can laugh at their troubles. They can enjoy sitcoms. For those who aren’t quite so lucky, well, the irony might be lost on them.”

— Harold Ramis

13. “I always claim that the writer has done 90 percent of the director’s work.”

— Harold Ramis

14. “Never hit anyone in anger, unless you’re absolutely sure you can get away with it.”

— Harold Ramis

15. “You can perceive life as tragic, or you can laugh at the tragedy of it and that turns it into comedy. It doesn’t change the circumstances.”

— Harold Ramis

16. “I did a comedy with Al Franken about his character Stuart Smalley, which was really about alcoholism and addiction and codependency. It had some painful stuff in it. When we showed it to focus groups, some of them actually said, “If I want to see a dysfunctional family, I’ll stay home.””

— Harold Ramis

17. “Most people live somewhere on the spectrum of anxiety and depression.”

— Harold Ramis

18. “Multiplicity was a movie that tested really well. People seeing the movie really liked it, but then the studio couldn’t market it. We opened on a weekend with nine other films.”

— Harold Ramis

19. “We all wish we could be in more than one place at the same time. People with families feel guilty all the time-if we spend too much time with our family, we feel we’re not working hard enough.”

— Harold Ramis

20. “The rule of thumb for a director or producer – which prevents them from just sticking their names on everything – is that you have to contribute substantially more than 50 percent of the character dialogue and story.”

— Harold Ramis

21. “Chicago still remains a Mecca of the Midwest – people from both coasts are kind of amazed how good life is in Chicago, and what a good culture we’ve got. You can have a pretty wonderful artistic life and never leave Chicago.”

— Harold Ramis

22. “Parents tell us things to protect us, or they educate us from their own misinformation or misconceptions.”

— Harold Ramis

23. “I believe things happen that can’t be explained, but so many people seem intent on explaining them. Everyone has an answer for them. Either aliens or things from the spirit world.”

— Harold Ramis

24. “First and foremost, you have to make the movie for yourself. And that’s not to say, to hell with everyone else, but what else have you got to go on but your own taste and judgment?”

— Harold Ramis

25. “A lot of people get into serious relationships thinking they’re going to heal someone with their love and attention, but it doesn’t usually work out that way. You can’t love somebody into a state of mental health.”

— Harold Ramis

26. “I look for the meaning in what’s funny, and I look for what’s funny about things that are meaningful to me.”

— Harold Ramis

27. “My only conclusion about structure is that nothing works if you don’t have interesting characters and a good story to tell.”

— Harold Ramis

28. “I was the little guy who knew how to tie a necktie. It came from having absentee parents. They were tremendously loving and caring people who, by circumstance, had to go to work.”

— Harold Ramis

29. “Analyze This is a good movie because Robert De Niro and Billy Crystal are really good. But without the material to put on the play, of course, they couldn’t be good. For me, it starts with the writing.”

— Harold Ramis

30. “I made a handshake agreement with my best friend in college, Michael Shamberg, who is now a movie producer. We used to write shows together, and we said, “Let’s only do what’s fun. Let’s never take a job where we have to dress up in a suit.””

— Harold Ramis

31. “There’s something very edgy about Bill Murray out there improvising.”

— Harold Ramis

32. “When you grow up in Chicago, your whole family is counting on you to go to college and do something distinguished. The last thing you’re thinking is that you’re going to make a career in show business.”

— Harold Ramis

33. “The comic impulse is sometimes a reaction to sadness. You feel like you can make one choice or the other.”

— Harold Ramis

34. “When you’re young and you first see the extent and depth of the world’s hypocrisy, it’s fun to go after it. But by the time you’re sixty, it’s so commonplace. What’s the point in ridiculing people anymore? Their existence itself is a sort of sick joke.”

— Harold Ramis

35. “I have tons of rescuing fantasies based on the movies I saw when I was growing up. I wanted to be Robin Hood and the Three Musketeers and the Scarlet Pimpernel.”

— Harold Ramis

36. “We tell our kids that policemen are good and God protects us and our country is noble, and at a certain point – and for some it comes quite early, five or six years old – we start to realize that it’s all a facade.”

— Harold Ramis

37. “I want to explore marriage without the usual Hallmark Card platitudes. Life is difficult, and I like movies that acknowledge that.”

— Harold Ramis

38. “I’ve never taken a script to the stage or to principal photography and said, “This is perfect. This is as good as it can possibly be.” It’s not Shakespeare, you know; you know it can probably be better.”

— Harold Ramis

39. “My characters aren’t losers. They’re rebels. They win by their refusal to play by everyone else’s rules.”

— Harold Ramis

40. “The trick with sequels is, you have to give people what they liked before, yet be innovative enough so they don’t feel like they’re seeing the same movie.”

— Harold Ramis

41. “There’s a personal story of my own that I will write at some point, and it’s a film that I will happily make. It could very well be the next thing I do, unless someone shows me something great.”

— Harold Ramis

42. “Stand-up is every man for himself; you learn from hanging out at these clubs and watching other guys, and then trying not to be like them.”

— Harold Ramis

43. “Comedy is essentially made by young men, or older men with some form of arrested development, for young men or immature older men.”

— Harold Ramis

44. “Groundhog Day was pretty clean. It may have to do with some puritanical feeling that comedy is a forbidden pleasure in a certain way. They make you laugh, and laughter is somehow an inferior emotion to tragedy.”

— Harold Ramis

45. “No matter what I have to say, I’m still trying to say it in comedic form.”

— Harold Ramis

46. “The first comedy screenplay that I wrote was Animal House and I always thought I could and should be a director but no one was about to give me that opportunity on Animal House.”

— Harold Ramis

47. “Films are big hits when they touch a lot of people. Things are not funny in a vacuum, they’re funny because we respond to some personal dislocation, some embarrassment, some humiliation, some pain we’ve suffered, or some desire we have.”

— Harold Ramis

48. “As an actor, you’re completely at the mercy of other people. You basically go begging for the opportunity to work. As a writer, at least nobody can tell me what to do. I can write what I want. I might not sell it, but at least I’m in control.”

— Harold Ramis

49. “I met someone who said they’d figured out my genre: “madcap redemption comedy.” I’ll buy that.”

— Harold Ramis

50. “If Chevy Chase had not been an actor, he might have been a very popular guy in advertising or whatever field he would have gone into, because of his charisma.”

— Harold Ramis