Top 300 Roger Ebert Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “We piled into the back of his big red Sun-Times truck: Robertson, McHugh, a bagpipe player, assorted other regulars, and Good Sydney Harris. Good Sydney Harris was a Spanish Civil War veteran, not to be confused with the Bad Sydney Harris, the Daily News columnist. Good Sydney had fallen into conversation with a dominatrix named Jake, who joined us.”

— Roger Ebert

302. “The ability of an audience to enter into the narrative arc of a movie is being lost; do today’s audiences have the patience to wait for Harry Lime in The Third Man?”

— Roger Ebert

303. “There must be something deep within our memory as a species that is pleased by being able to look at what is making us warm.”

— Roger Ebert

304. “Who was the real Hitchcock? I interviewed him once and haven’t a clue.”

— Roger Ebert

305. “Artists are rarely members of the popular crowd.”

— Roger Ebert

306. “I think that probably the – I don’t give quotes to studios. They have to get those out of the paper or from television. So they wouldn’t have had my quote opening day.”

— Roger Ebert

307. “A corner is important. It provides privacy and an anchor and lets you exist independently of the room.”

— Roger Ebert

308. “We feel the same emotions for our ideas as we do for the real world, which is why we can cry while reading a book, or fall in love with movie stars.”

— Roger Ebert

309. “If Hollywood stars speak out, so do all sorts of other people. Now Hollywood stars can get a better hearing.”

— Roger Ebert

310. “The right really dominates radio, and it’s amazing how much energy the right spends telling us that the press is slanted to the left when it really isn’t. They want to shut other people up. They really don’t understand the First Amendment.”

— Roger Ebert

311. “The movie has, above all, effortless charm. Once we catch on that nothing much is going to happen, we can relax and share the amusement of the actors, who are essentially being asked to share their playfulness.”

— Roger Ebert

312. “Samurai films, like westerns, need not be familiar genre stories. They can expand to contain stories of ethical challenges and human tragedy.”

— Roger Ebert

313. “I’m kind of glad the web is sort of totally anarchic. That’s fine with me.”

— Roger Ebert

314. “All over the web there are some very good critics and it’s become for people who are interested. It’s become a very good way to get to reviews and involve yourself in discussions.”

— Roger Ebert

315. “Fast Food Rule. Wanna know what the summer’s blockbuster is going to be? See who McDonald’s does the marketing tie-in with. Wanna know what blockbuster will do disappointing business? See who Burger King ties in with.”

— Roger Ebert

316. “Blockbusters run the mainstream industry. We may never again have a decade like the 1970s, when directors were able to find such freedom.”

— Roger Ebert

317. “I’ve been told that I am evil. I’ve been told that I am behind the persecution of millions of Americans. That I have encouraged hate toward gays. I’ve received both very brief and obscene messages, and very long and literate messages that tell me a vote for Crash was vote for homophobia.”

— Roger Ebert

318. “There must be a better reason to have a baby than to provide a plot point in a rom-com. Don’t you think?”

— Roger Ebert

319. “All but a very few of us are in debt. We exist as entities who borrow money and spend the rest of our lives making interest payments on a debt tally that never seems to budge. Whatever wealth we have, in labor, property or cash, is suctioned to the top.”

— Roger Ebert

320. “Inside every sadist is a masochist, cringing to taste his own medicine.”

— Roger Ebert

321. “I just assume I’m right. Partially out of conviction and partially as a pose.”

— Roger Ebert

322. “The Toys of a Lifetime.”

— Roger Ebert

323. “Pixar is the first studio that is a movie star.”

— Roger Ebert

324. “Neither the mob nor Vegas could exist if most people weren’t optimists.”

— Roger Ebert

325. “It is comforting to think that we can love so powerfully that fate itself wheels and turns at the command of our souls.”

— Roger Ebert

326. “You look at them and wonder how, at any stage of the production, anyone could have thought there was a watchable movie here.”

— Roger Ebert

327. “It’s easier to identify with loss than love, because we have had so much more experience of it.”

— Roger Ebert

328. “Because we can engineer genetics, because we can telecast real lives-of course we must, right? But are these good things to do? The irony is, the people who will finally answer that question will be the very ones produced by the process.”

— Roger Ebert

329. “A lot of first novels are written long before they’re actually put down on paper.”

— Roger Ebert

330. “I’ll tell you, I think that the Internet has provided an enormous boost to film criticism by giving people an opportunity to self publish or to find sites that are friendly.”

— Roger Ebert

331. “One, don’t wait for inspiration, just start the damned thing. Two, once you begin, keep on until the end. How do you know how the story should begin until you find out where it’s going?”

— Roger Ebert

332. “Why are some people bullied? Because they are different. How? It doesn’t matter.”

— Roger Ebert

333. “Unlike modern films where superstars dominate every scene, the Hollywood films of the golden era have depth in writing and casting, so the story can resonate with more than one tone.”

— Roger Ebert

334. “One sign of a great actor is when he can be alone by himself on the screen, doing almost nothing, and producing one of a film’s defining moments.”

— Roger Ebert

335. “It is a truism that Hollywood trailers advertise not the movie that has been made, but the movie that the studio wishes had been made.”

— Roger Ebert

336. “Is she killing these guys in a blackout? Wasn’t it Ann Landers who said that’s one of the twenty danger signals of alcoholism?”

— Roger Ebert

337. “Some movies run off the rails. This one is like the train crash in The Fugitive.”

— Roger Ebert

338. “Strange that movies about Satan always require Catholics. You never see your Presbyterians or Episcopalians hurling down demons.”

— Roger Ebert

339. “He was an editor for seven years before directing his first film, and his career stands as an argument for the theory that editors make better directors than cine-matographers do; the cinematographer is seduced by the look of a film, while the editor is faced with the task of making it work as a story.”

— Roger Ebert

340. “Fallacy of the Talking Killer. The villain wants to kill the hero. He has him cornered at gunpoint. All he has to do is pull the trigger. But he always talks first. He explains the hero’s mistakes to him. Jeers. Laughs. And gives the hero time to think his way out of the situation, or be rescued by his buddy. Cf. most James Bond movies.”

— Roger Ebert

341. “Films are no longer concerned with the silence of God, but with the chattering of men.”

— Roger Ebert

342. “Their costumes look purchased from the Goodwill store on Tatoine.”

— Roger Ebert

343. “When, in a free society, the press is criticized for negativity, that almost always means it has dared to question the policies of the party in power. ‘Patriotism,’ Samuel Johnson said, ‘is the last refuge of a scoundrel.’ He could have been speaking of those who use it to shield themselves from dissent.”

— Roger Ebert