Top 300 Roger Ebert Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “If there’s anything I hate more than a stupid action comedy, it’s an incompetent stupid action comedy. It’s not so bad it’s good. It’s so bad it’s nothing else but bad.”

— 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. “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

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

— 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. “On this ancient and miraculous world, where such beautiful natural and living things have evolved, something has gone wrong when life itself is used as a manufacturing process.”

— Roger Ebert

159. “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

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. “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

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

— Roger Ebert

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

— Roger Ebert

165. “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

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

— Roger Ebert

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

— Roger Ebert

168. “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

169. “Steak ’n Shake!”

— Roger Ebert

170. “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

171. “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

172. “2001: A Space Odyssey is not about a goal, but about a quest, a need.”

— Roger Ebert

173. “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

174. “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

175. “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

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

— Roger Ebert

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

— Roger Ebert

178. “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

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

— Roger Ebert

180. “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

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

— Roger Ebert

182. “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

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

— Roger Ebert

184. “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

185. “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

186. “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

187. “All good art is about something deeper than it admits.”

— Roger Ebert

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

— Roger Ebert

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

— Roger Ebert

190. “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

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

— Roger Ebert

192. “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

193. “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

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

— Roger Ebert

195. “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.”

— Roger Ebert

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

— Roger Ebert

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

— Roger Ebert

198. “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.”

— Roger Ebert

199. “One of the weapons Marvel used in its climb to comic-book dominance was a willingness to invent new characters at a dizzying speed. There are so many Marvel universes, indeed, that some superheroes do not even exist in one another’s worlds, preventing gridlock.”

— Roger Ebert

200. “Who wants to live in the present? It’s such a limiting period compared to the past.”

— Roger Ebert