Roger Ebert

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.

My lifetime’s memories are what I have brought home from the trip. I will require them for eternity no more than that little souvenir of the Eiffel Tower I brought home from Paris.

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.

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

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.

Nobody looks perfect. We have to find peace with the way we look and get on with life.

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

Sometimes, it's all about the casting.

Movies absorb our attention more completely, I think.

Most of us do not consciously look at movies.

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

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

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

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

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.

A film like Hoop Dreams is what the movies are for. It takes us, shakes us, and makes us think in new ways about the world around us. It gives us the impression of having touched life itself.

Movies are like a machine that generates empathy.

Just write, get better, keep writing, keep getting better. It's the only thing you can control.

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?

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

I was indeed a snob, if you agree with this definition: 'A person who believes that their tastes in a particular area are superior to those of other people.' I do believe that. Not superior to all other people, but to some, most probably including those who think Transformers: Revenge of The Fallen is a great film. That is not simply ego on my part. It is a faith that after writing and teaching about films for more than 40 years, my tastes are more evolved than those of a fanboy.