Roger Ebert

A film is a terrible thing to waste.

One difference between film noir and more straightforward crime pictures is that noir is more open to human flaws and likes to embed them in twisty plot lines.

Movies absorb our attention more completely, I think.

'Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter' is without a doubt the best film we are ever likely to see on the subject - unless there is a sequel, which is unlikely, because at the end, the Lincolns are on their way to the theater.

The problem with being sure that God is on your side is that you can't change your mind, because God sure isn't going to change His.

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

Every great film should seem new every time you see it.

By going to the movies, and because of other things, too, going to college, making a wide variety of friends, moving around traveling, I became a lot more open-minded than the heritage I was born into might have suggested.

It's a good question, because a movie isn't good or bad based on its politics. It's usually good or bad for other reasons, though you might agree or disagree with its politics.

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

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

You can't just tell actors, especially young ones, to 'act happy' and expect them to do it. They must in some essential way be happy.

Here's a notion: Peace in the Middle East would come about more easily if the region were governed by women.

I am utterly bored by celebrity interviews. Most celebrities are devoid of interest.

Are vampires kinky? I didn't know.

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

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.

The buried code of many American films has become: If I kill you, I have won and you have lost. The instinctive ethical code of traditional Hollywood, the code by which characters like James Stewart, John Wayne and Henry Fonda lived, has been lost.

I don't require movies to be about good people, and I don't reject screen violence.

Life is made up of challenges that cannot be solved but only accepted.

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

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

Catholic theology believes that God gave man free will and you cant give somebody free will and then send in a play from the sidelines.

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.

No good movie is too long and no bad movie is short enough.

It's not what a movie is about, it's how it is about it.

Lebanon was at one time known as a nation that rose above sectarian hatred; Beirut was known as the Paris of the Middle East. All of that was blown apart by senseless religious wars, financed and exploited in part by those who sought power and wealth. If women had been in charge, would they have been more sensible? It's a theory.

Low self esteem involves imagining the worst that other people can think about you.

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.

The very fact of snow is such an amazement.

I believe empathy is the most essential quality of civilization.

Many thrillers follow such reliable formulas that you can look at what's happening and guess how much longer a film has to run.

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

Who was the real Hitchcock? I interviewed him once and haven't a clue.

You can have a movie with hardly any cuts, or very few cuts, that is fascinating, you can't take your eyes away from it... Look at some of the long takes in Citizen Kane.

I think we have to get beyond the idea that we have to categorize people.

Open-heart surgery is now part of a typical life experience for many people. Folks talk casually about 'having a stent put in,' as if they had their tires rotated.

Why are some people bullied? Because they are different. How? It doesn't matter.

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.

It is quite possible for the vulgar to be funny, but to succeed, it must rise to a certain genius.

Time is what the depressed and panicked lack.

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.

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.

But considering that I walked in expecting no complexity at all, let alone the visual wonderments, 'Snow White and the Huntsman' is a considerable experience.

Dogs notice, they share, they draw conclusions, they like it when they're able to be of service and are touchingly grateful when they're praised.

The Academy is paranoid about its image.

There's nothing like impending death to rouse you from existential boredom.

We are the playthings of the gods.

There's something depressing about a young couple helplessly in love. Their state is so perfect, it must be doomed. They project such qualities on their lover that only disappointment can follow.

I begin to feel like I was in the last generation of Americans who took a civics class.

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.

It is quite possible for the vulgar to be funny, but to succeed, it must rise to a certain genius.

A few actresses have all but set up shop as women of a certain age who attract younger lovers. I think of Susan Sarandon, Cameron Diaz and Isabelle Huppert.

In Hollywood, 'under development' means 'all I have is the title.'

Sometimes it's all about the casting.

If your religion doesn't respect the rights of other religions, it is lacking something.

I've never found kicks to the groin particularly funny, although recent work in the genre of the buddy movie suggests audience research must prove me wrong.

' The Lucky One' is at its heart a romance novel, elevated however by Nicholas Sparks' persuasive storytelling. Readers don't read his books because they're true, but because they ought to be true.

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.

The movies that are made more thoughtfully or made or with more ambition often get just get drowned out by the noise.

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.

If you can act as if something is true, in a sense that makes it true.

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

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

We can't help identifying with the protagonist. It's coded in our movie-going DNA.

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.

Parents and schools should place great emphasis on the idea that it is all right to be different. Racism and all the other 'isms' grow from primitive tribalism, the instinctive hostility against those of another tribe, race, religion, nationality, class or whatever. You are a lucky child if your parents taught you to accept diversity.

Many really good films allow us to empathize with other lives.

To die is one thing. How much worse to know that all the life that ever existed on this planet, and all it ever achieved, was to be obliterated?

There is a part of me that will forever want to be walking under autumn leaves, carrying a briefcase containing the works of Shakespeare and Yeats and a portable chess set. I will pass an old tree under which once on a summer night I lay on the grass with a fragrant young woman and we quoted e.e. cummings back and forth.

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.

I begin to feel like most Americans don't understand the First Amendment, don't understand the idea of freedom of speech, and don't understand that it's the responsibility of the citizen to speak out.

Most of us do not consciously look at movies.

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.

'Grand Illusion' and 'Rules of the Game' are routinely included on lists of the greatest films, and deserve to be.

Horror fans are a particular breed. They analyze films with such detail and expertise that I am reminded of the Canadian literary critic Northrup Frye, who approached literature with similar archetypal analysis.

I'm told we movie critics praise movies that are long and boring.

It's rare to find a film that goes for broke and says, 'To hell with the consequences.'

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

A lot of people just go to movies that feed into their preexisting and not so noble needs and desires: They just go to action pictures, and things like that.

Wes Anderson's mind must be an exciting place for a story idea to be born. It immediately becomes more than a series of events and is transformed into a world with its own rules, in which everything is driven by emotions and desires as convincing as they are magical.

The idea that a book can advise a woman how to capture a man is touchingly naive. Books advising men how to capture a woman are far less common, perhaps because few men are willing to admit to such a difficulty. For both sexes, I recommend a good novel, offering scenarios you might learn from, if only because they reflect a lot of doubt.

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.

I don't think Bush was legitimately elected President.

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.

Nothing ever seems straightforward in Venice, least of all its romances.

I like smart movies about smart people, and enjoy it when most of the facts are on the table and we can contemplate them together.

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.

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.

Anyone who reads advice books about romance has one problem to begin with: bad taste in literature.

It's not often a thriller keeps me wound up as well as 'Headhunters' did. I knew I was being manipulated and didn't care. It was a pleasure to see how well it was being done.

It is reckless to make broad generalizations about any group of people.

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.

Doing research on the Web is like using a library assembled piecemeal by pack rats and vandalized nightly.

Teaching prejudice to a child is itself a form of bullying. You've got to be taught to hate.

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

Life's missed opportunities, at the end, may seem more poignant to us than those we embraced because in our imagination they have a perfection that reality can never rival.

Families and their problems go on and on and they arent solved theyre dealt with.

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.

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.