Roger Ebert Quotes - Page 11

I will one day be thin, but Vincent Gallo will always be the director of The Brown Bunny.

The Academy is paranoid about its image.

All good art is about something deeper than it admits.

Film theory has nothing to do with film. Students presumably hope to find out something about film, and all they will find out is an occult and arcane language designed only for the purpose of excluding those who have not mastered it and giving academic rewards to those who have. No one with any literacy, taste or intelligence would want to teach these courses, so the bona fide definition of people teaching them are people who are incapable of teaching anything else.

The purpose of civilization and growth is to be able to reach out and empathize with other people... For me, the movies are like a machine that generates empathy.

The ability of so many people to live comfortably with the idea of capital punishment is perhaps a clue to how so many Europeans were able to live with the idea of the Holocaust: Once you accept the notion that the state has the right to kill someone and the right to define what is a capital crime, aren't you halfway there?

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

It considers not only how we relate to others, but how we relate to our ideas of others so that a completely phony, non-human replica of a dead wife can inspire the same feelings that the wife herself once did. That is a peculiarity of humans: 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. Our idea of humanity bewitches us, while humanity itself stays safely sealed away into its billions of separate containers, or "people.

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.

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

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.

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

Rollerball is an incoherent mess, a jumble of footage in search of plot, meaning, rhythm and sense. There are bright colors and quick movement on the screen, which we can watch as a visual pattern that, in entertainment value, falls somewhere between a kaleidoscope and a lava lamp.

It is more erotic to wonder if you're about to be kissed than it is to be kissed.

A film is a terrible thing to waste.

In the best of all possible worlds, directors would obsess about the quality of their storytelling, and not the details of their technical methods.

[D]oes the real world have any more substance than visions and hallucinations when we're having them? At any given moment, what's happening in our minds is all and everything that happens.

Well, we're all dying in increments. I don't mind people knowing what I look like, but I don't want them thinking I'm dying.

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.

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.

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.

It is human nature to look away from illness. We don't enjoy a reminder of our own fragile mortality.

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

The film argues to the young that the old were young once, too, and contain within them all that the young know, and more.

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