Top 300 Roger Ebert Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “In thinking about ‘depressing movies,’ many people don’t realize that all bad movies are depressing, and no good movies are.”

— Roger Ebert

152. “Ridley Scott’s ‘Prometheus’ is a magnificent science-fiction film, all the more intriguing because it raises questions about the origin of human life and doesn’t have the answers.”

— Roger Ebert

153. “We spend too much time hiding illness.”

— Roger Ebert

154. “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

155. “It’s like the high school production of something you saw at Steppenwolf, with the most gifted students in drama class playing the John Malkovich and Joan Allen roles.”

— Roger Ebert

156. “Most of us do not consciously look at movies.”

— Roger Ebert

157. “It is more erotic to wonder if you’re about to be kissed than it is to be kissed.”

— Roger Ebert

158. “Most courtroom movies feel it necessary to end with a clear-cut verdict. But 12 Angry Men never states whether the defendant is innocent or guilty. It is about whether the jury has a reasonable doubt about his guilt.”

— Roger Ebert

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

— Roger Ebert

160. “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

161. “I am informed that 5,000 cockroaches were used in the filming of Joe’s Apartment. That depresses me, but not as much as the news that none of them were harmed during the production.”

— Roger Ebert

162. “I am grateful for the gifts of intelligence, love, wonder and laughter. You can’t say it wasn’t interesting.”

— Roger Ebert

163. “It’s rare to find a film that goes for broke and says, ‘To hell with the consequences.’”

— Roger Ebert

164. “We can now have action movies with two stars where one might be African American and one might be Asian American. One of them doesn’t have to be white, and the other one doesn’t have to be the ethnic sidekick. We’re way over that. And I think it’s happening in society, too.”

— Roger Ebert

165. “In the world of acting, many are thin but few are talented.”

— Roger Ebert

166. “Steak ’n Shake!”

— Roger Ebert

167. “It is human nature to look away from illness. We don’t enjoy a reminder of our own fragile mortality. That’s why writing on the Internet has become a life-saver for me. My ability to think and write have not been affected. And on the Web, my real voice finds expression.”

— Roger Ebert

168. “If I were more of a hero, I would spend the next couple of weeks breaking into theaters where this movie is being shown, and leading the audience to safety.”

— Roger Ebert

169. “2001: A Space Odyssey is not about a goal, but about a quest, a need.”

— Roger Ebert

170. “In my reviews, I feel it’s good to make it clear that I’m not proposing objective truth, but subjective reactions; a review should reflect the immediate experience.”

— Roger Ebert

171. “Dogs remember every favor you ever do for them and store those events in a memory bank titled Why My Human Is A God.”

— Roger Ebert

172. “Why has Scandinavia been producing such good thrillers? Maybe because their filmmakers can’t afford millions for CGI and must rely on cheaper elements like, you know, stories and characters.”

— Roger Ebert

173. “We can’t help identifying with the protagonist. It’s coded in our movie-going DNA.”

— Roger Ebert

174. “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.”

— Roger Ebert

175. “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.”

— Roger Ebert

176. “I know as a critic I’m required to have a well-armored heart. I must be a cynical wise guy to show my great sophistication. No pushover, me.”

— Roger Ebert

177. “Marlon Brando is the most influential movie actor of the century.”

— Roger Ebert

178. “Not everyone needs to be slammed into a category and locked there.”

— Roger Ebert

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

— Roger Ebert

180. “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

181. “Start. Don’t look back. If at the end it doesn’t meet your hopes, start again. Now you know more about your hopes.”

— Roger Ebert

182. “What happens in a fantasy can be more involving than what happens in life, and thank goodness for that.”

— Roger Ebert

183. “It is universally agreed that Jean Renoir was one of the greatest of all directors, and he was also one of the warmest and most entertaining.”

— Roger Ebert

184. “You can’t say it wasn’t interesting.”

— Roger Ebert

185. “Since any reasonable person would choose a Mac over a PC, Apple’s market share provides us with an accurate reading of the percentage of reasonable people in our society.”

— Roger Ebert

186. “To call A Lot like Love dead in the water is an insult to water.”

— Roger Ebert

187. “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.”

— Roger Ebert

188. “We think of first love as sweet and valuable, a blessed if hazardous condition.”

— Roger Ebert

189. “The movies that last, the ones we return to, don’t always have lofty themes or Byzantine complexities. Sometimes they last because they are arrows straight to the heart.”

— Roger Ebert

190. “To say that George Lucas cannot write a love scene is an understatement; greeting cards have expressed more passion.”

— Roger Ebert

191. “Why do alcoholics begin down the same hazardous road day after day? They are in search of that elusive window of well-being that opens when you drink your way out of a hangover and aren’t yet drunk all over again. The alcoholic’s day consists of trying to keep that window open.”

— Roger Ebert

192. “And I think both the left and the right should celebrate people who have different opinions, and disagree with them, and argue with them, and differ with them, but don’t just try to shut them up.”

— Roger Ebert

193. “It is not enough for a movie to be righteous. It must also be watchable.”

— Roger Ebert

194. “I began to realize that I had tended to avoid some people because of my instant conclusions about who they were and what they would have to say. I discovered that everyone, speaking honestly and openly, had important things to tell me.”

— Roger Ebert

195. “I believe that young people wearing hoods, unless they are very young, can be frightening. What are they hiding? Why don’t they want to come out into the light with the rest of us? They may be perfectly nice, but the hoods send an uncertain statement.”

— Roger Ebert

196. “Why is it that English, drama and music teachers are most often recalled as our mentors and inspirations? Maybe because artists are rarely members of the popular crowd.”

— Roger Ebert

197. “Siskel’s classic question, “Is this movie better than a documentary of the same actors having lunch?”

— Roger Ebert

198. “Movies absorb our attention more completely, I think.”

— Roger Ebert

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

— Roger Ebert

200. “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.”

— Roger Ebert