Top 100 Harold Ramis Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “You can’t love somebody into a state of mental health.”

— Harold Ramis

52. “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

53. “I try to measure the amount of truth in a work rather than just looking at the generic distinction between comedy and drama.”

— Harold Ramis

54. “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

55. “I’m not a believer in the pratfall. I don’t think it’s funny just to have someone fall down.”

— Harold Ramis

56. “Most comedy is not very ambitious. You probably can’t name more than a handful of comedies that would qualify for Best Picture.”

— Harold Ramis

57. “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

58. “I’m a writer-director-actor, which I’ve always kind of enjoyed. I compared it to the Olympic biathlon. “Not only can he cross-country ski, but he’s a terrific marksman as well.” I want people to say, “You mean that writer performed a tracheotomy?” That’s right, I do everything.”

— Harold Ramis

59. “If people offer me decent roles in good films, of course I’ll take it. But I just didn’t like the actor lifestyle. You end up focusing all your energy on trying to get parts you don’t even want.”

— Harold Ramis

60. “I’d rather do comedies that strike at some bigger ideas.”

— Harold Ramis

61. “I loved writing and performing, but the idea of doing it for a living seemed so remote. But I eventually let it devolve to the point where it was the only thing I could do.”

— Harold Ramis

62. “I used to be married to a woman who pursued every spiritual trend with tremendous passion and dragged me along. I don’t believe in anything. I’d seen mediums and readers.”

— Harold Ramis

63. “For me, most comedy scripts fail in the mechanical playing-out of the setup. They’ll pay lip service to a moral lesson or a psychological progression.”

— Harold Ramis

64. “I’m thinking of doing a marital comedy for one of the studios, but I want it to be so painful that it’ll have a profound effect on married couples who see it together.”

— Harold Ramis

65. “Once you’re alienated, you’re on your own. That takes you to the world of the existential, where things just kind of float.”

— Harold Ramis

66. “It doesn’t take any longer to improvise 10 takes than it takes to shoot 10 takes of the same thing. It turns out to be just as responsible from a business point of view as anything else.”

— Harold Ramis

67. “As much as I liked acting for its playfulness and the reward of hearing big laughs wash over you on a stage, I always felt I should do something that I could control.”

— Harold Ramis

68. “When I’ve written for Bill Murray – I’ve written six films for him – people would read it and say, “Oh, that’s so perfectly Bill.” He’d read it and say, “Are you kidding? I can’t say these words.” So it’s all about perception.”

— Harold Ramis

69. “You can’t not have feelings about country clubs, whichever side you’re on.”

— Harold Ramis

70. “I feel a big obligation to the audience, almost in a moral sense, to say something useful. If I’m going to spend a year of my life on these things, I want something that I feel that strongly about.”

— Harold Ramis

71. “The cutting room is where you discover the optimal length of the movie.”

— Harold Ramis

72. “Some people have a fear of rejecting all the security that comes with family, church and state. They become fundamentalists.”

— Harold Ramis

73. “I can’t imagine a successful comedy movie without a successful comedy performance at the heart of it.”

— Harold Ramis

74. “The times change, and to the extent that comedy captures the spirit of the times, it will enjoy success.”

— Harold Ramis

75. “At a certain point, you have to convince the actors that you’ve done the right thing. The way I work, if I can’t convince them, I’ve got to move on. I can’t coerce them or browbeat them.”

— Harold Ramis

76. “You don’t have to know much, just a little bit more than everybody else.”

— Harold Ramis

77. “Most comedies are calculated. They tend to pander. They’re not about anything important.”

— Harold Ramis

78. “It’s like the old rule-if you introduce a gun into the first act of a play, it’s going to be used in the third act. So if you do a movie about criminals, you have to accept there’s going to be Some action.”

— Harold Ramis

79. “When someone’s an actor and you’re an actor, you meet them and you feel like you know them. We’re in the same business, and we all speak the same comedy language.”

— Harold Ramis

80. “No one will laugh at how great things are for somebody.”

— Harold Ramis

81. “That’s one of the great things about DVD: In addition to reaching people who didn’t catch the movie in theaters, you get to have this interaction of sorts.”

— Harold Ramis

82. “Whenever a critic mentions the salary of an actor, I’m thinking, He’s not talking about the movie.”

— Harold Ramis

83. “I had a lot of fun working with John Candy. We had a pretty good rapport.”

— Harold Ramis

84. “I’ve always had that overweening desire to be liked by the audience.”

— Harold Ramis

85. “My first few films were institutional comedies, and you’re on pretty safe ground when you’re dealing with an institution that vast numbers of people have experienced: college, summer camp, the military, the country club.”

— Harold Ramis

86. “I’ve tried to stay away from mild satire. I want an audience to feel something more powerful for their ten bucks. If they’re going to spend two hours with me, and trust me to lead them around, I’d like to take them someplace special.”

— Harold Ramis

87. “With both Caddyshack and Vacation, it’s not like the subjects were serious enough that they engaged my interest for another round. I love the characters, and the actors were great, but I didn’t see the need to make another Vacation movie.”

— Harold Ramis

88. “When you’re a big enough part of the process that the Writers Guild gives you a lot of credit, that’s a good thing. It tells me that I’ve had a significant impact on the film as a writer.”

— Harold Ramis

89. “I learned over the years that it’s easy to appear smart referencing things that people don’t know.”

— Harold Ramis

90. “We were tremendously encouraged by the testing of Analyze That. Audiences loved it. They were telling us that they liked it as much as the original. We recorded the laughs in the theater.”

— Harold Ramis

91. “If you’re doing six takes, instead of doing six variations on the same words, why not just throw out the words and make them up as you go along, if you’re comfortable with it? It gives the movies a slightly rangier feeling, and more of an accidental feel, but it also makes them edgier.”

— Harold Ramis

92. “My job is to come up with something that you like and you agree with that you would play wholeheartedly. If we disagree, I may not be doing my job correctly.”

— Harold Ramis

93. “I’ve been directing for 25 years almost, and I’ve only directed nine films in that time because I like to be careful.”

— Harold Ramis

94. “Just expressing contempt for your leaders doesn’t really accomplish anything.”

— Harold Ramis

95. “When a director writes, there’s a compulsory arbitration. You have a right to challenge any of the arbitrators, but they pick three of four arbitrators who read all the drafts with no names attached and then allocate credit.”

— Harold Ramis

96. “I never read Playboy before I started working there and stopped reading it the day I quit.”

— Harold Ramis

97. “I’d like to think I’d never do a gratuitous fart joke.”

— Harold Ramis

98. “It’s a great luxury for me to be able to write on the films that I direct, and kind of a nice thing to be able to write enough to get credit, which is difficult for a director.”

— Harold Ramis

99. “I had developed a survival skill of using my wit to score for myself. If a scene was dying, I’d lob in these little bombshell lines that would get me some attention and a laugh without really helping the scene.”

— Harold Ramis

100. “I think of myself as a real writer, not just someone who dabbles in it, so I deserve some credit.”

— Harold Ramis