Top 300 Roger Ebert Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “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

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

— Roger Ebert

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

— Roger Ebert

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

— Roger Ebert

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

— Roger Ebert

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

— Roger Ebert

207. “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

208. “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

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

— Roger Ebert

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

— Roger Ebert

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

— Roger Ebert

212. “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

213. “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

214. “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

215. “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

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

— 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. “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

219. “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

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

— Roger Ebert

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

— Roger Ebert

222. “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

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

— Roger Ebert

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

— Roger Ebert

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

— Roger Ebert

226. “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

227. “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

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

— Roger Ebert

229. “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

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

— Roger Ebert

231. “Here’s how much I know about hockey. Mike Royko and I were in a tiny bar one winter night, and the radio kept reporting goals by the Blackhawks. I mentioned how frequently the team was scoring. ‘You’re listening to the highlights,’ Royko observed.”

— Roger Ebert

232. “As the man says in the play, for this relief, much thanks.”

— Roger Ebert

233. “The Academy is paranoid about its image.”

— Roger Ebert

234. “It often strikes me that the actors in high school movies look too old.”

— Roger Ebert

235. “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

236. “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

237. “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

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

— Roger Ebert

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

— Roger Ebert

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

— Roger Ebert

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

— Roger Ebert

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

— Roger Ebert

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

— Roger Ebert

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

— Roger Ebert

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

— Roger Ebert

246. “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

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

— Roger Ebert

248. “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

249. “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

250. “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