Top 300 Roger Ebert Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “All good art is about something deeper than it admits.”

— Roger Ebert

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

— Roger Ebert

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

— Roger Ebert

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

— Roger Ebert

205. “That’s what fantasies are for, to help us imagine that things are better than they are.”

— Roger Ebert

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

— Roger Ebert

207. “As I swim through the summer tide of vulgarity, I find that’s what I’m looking for: Movies that at least feel affection for their characters. Raunchy is OK. Cruel is not.”

— Roger Ebert

208. “We must try to contribute joy to the world. I didn’t always know this and am happy I lived long enough to find it out.”

— Roger Ebert

209. “Perhaps it is the nature of man not to wish to know too much about his own nature.”

— Roger Ebert

210. “Movies are not about moving, but about whether to move.”

— Roger Ebert

211. “I was perfectly content before I was born, and I think of death as the same state.”

— Roger Ebert

212. “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.”

— Roger Ebert

213. “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

214. “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

215. “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

216. “When you’re young you don’t realize that at every age you are always in the present, and in that sense no older;.”

— Roger Ebert

217. “As we leave the theater, we are absolutely convinced that the only thing keeping the world from going crazy is that the problems of three little people do, after all, amount to more than a hill of beans.”

— Roger Ebert

218. “Entertainment is about the way things should be. Art is about the way they are.”

— Roger Ebert

219. “It is hard enough to be good at all, but to be good in comedy speaks for your character.”

— Roger Ebert

220. “The layout was griping, the glide is awesome. Two ten-inch fins up, way up.”

— Roger Ebert

221. “Now I see that all relationships are virtual, even those that take place in person. Whether we use our bodies or a keyboard, it all comes down to two minds crying out from their solitude.”

— Roger Ebert

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

— Roger Ebert

223. “In our lives, we surf the wave of chance.”

— Roger Ebert

224. “The Golden Thumb is not as good as the Oscar, but it is a lot of fun.”

— Roger Ebert

225. “When we’re discussing who to invite to a dinner party, my wife Chaz and I sometimes use the shorthand, ‘good value for money,’ which indicates guests expected to be entertaining.”

— Roger Ebert

226. “What a terrible thing it would be to be the Pope! What unthinkable responsibilities to fall on your shoulders at an advanced age! No privacy. No seclusion. No sin.”

— Roger Ebert

227. “I don’t think Bush was legitimately elected President.”

— Roger Ebert

228. “3-D is a waste of a perfectly good dimension. Hollywood’s current crazy stampede toward it is suicidal. It adds nothing essential to the moviegoing experience. For some, it is an annoying distraction. For others, it creates nausea and headaches.”

— Roger Ebert

229. “What you see is so much less than what you get.”

— Roger Ebert

230. “Drama holds a mirror up to life, but needn’t reproduce it.”

— Roger Ebert

231. “Well, you know what, I’m 60 years old, and I’ve been interested in politics since I was on my daddy’s knee. During the 1948 election, we were praying for Truman. I know a lot about politics.”

— Roger Ebert

232. “I think most people are more susceptible to prejudice than to reason.”

— Roger Ebert

233. “Under no circumstances will I ever purchase anything offered to me as the result of an unsolicited e-mail message. Nor will I forward chain letters, petitions, mass mailings, or virus warnings to large numbers of others. This is my contribution to the survival of the online community.”

— Roger Ebert

234. “Films to the degree that they glorify mindlessness and short attention span they are bad, to the degree that they encourage empathy with people not like ourselves and encourage us to think about life, they are good.”

— Roger Ebert

235. “From a dramatic viewpoint, there are few professions that grant their members entry into other lives, high among them cops, doctors, clergymen, journalists and prostitutes. Perhaps that explains why they figure in so much television and cinema. Their lives are lived in the midst of human drama.”

— Roger Ebert

236. “We are poor mortals, but it dreams to us that we can fly.”

— Roger Ebert

237. “Cinema, for me, has always been something like music composed with photographic images.”

— Roger Ebert

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

— Roger Ebert

239. “It’s the same the world over. A Hollywood production comes to town, and the locals all turn movie crazy.”

— Roger Ebert

240. “But the fact is, most people are not going to be rich someday.”

— Roger Ebert

241. “What makes people interesting is the spirit that shines through.”

— Roger Ebert

242. “It does seem true that a lot of people will do anything, however humiliating, for fame.”

— Roger Ebert

243. “The world of French crime films is a particular place, informed by the French love for Hollywood film noir, a genre they identified and named. But the great French noirs of the 1950s are not copies of Hollywood; instead, they have a particularly French flavor.”

— Roger Ebert

244. “Oh, here comes Mel Blanc, the voice of Bugs Bunny and Jimmy Smits!”

— Roger Ebert

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

— Roger Ebert

246. “EVERY TIME I see a dog in a movie, I think the same thing: I want that dog. I see Skip or Lucy or Shiloh and for a moment I can’t even think about the movie’s plot. I can only think about the dog. I want to hold it, pet it, take it for walks, and tell it what a good dog it is. I want to love it, and I want it to love me. I have an empty space inside myself that can only be filled by a dog.”

— Roger Ebert

247. “It’s funny that there was so much disturbance about having a Catholic in the White House with Kennedy, and when we finally get a religion in the White House that’s causing a lot of conflicts, and concerns, and disturbances for a lot of people, it’s in the Bush Administration.”

— Roger Ebert

248. “It’s the worst kind of bad film: the kind that gets you all worked up and then lets you down, instead of just being lousy from the first shot.”

— Roger Ebert

249. “It is commonplace to say that silent films are more “dreamlike,” but what does that mean? In Nosferatu, it means that the characters are confronted with alarming images and denied the freedom to talk them away. There is no repartee in nightmares. Human speech dissipates the shadows and makes a room seem normal. Those things that live only at night do not need to talk, for their victims are asleep, waiting.”

— Roger Ebert

250. “Sometimes miraculous films come into being, made by people you’ve never heard of, starring unknown faces, blindsiding you with creative genius.”

— Roger Ebert