Quotes from Roger Ebert

It's hard to explain the fun to be found in seeing the right kind of bad movie.

It is said that the human brain divides its functions. The right brain is devoted to sensory impressions, emotions, colors, music. The left brain deals with abstract thought, logic, philosophy, analysis. My definition of a great movie: While you're watching it, it engages your right brain. When it's over, it engages your left brain.

Never marry someone who doesn't love the movies you love. Sooner or later, that person will not love you.

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

Dogs remember every favor you ever do for them and store those events in a memory bank titled Why My Human Is A God.

Entertainment is about the way things should be. Art is about the way they are.

As a child I simply did not notice whether a movie was in color or not. The movies themselves were such an overwhelming mystery that if they wanted to be in black and white, that was their business.

Gene Siskel used to describe old-age makeup as making young actors look like turtles.

Aren't you getting tired of people hating one another? What do they think they get out of it?

When you're young you don't realize that at every age you are always in the present, and in that sense no older;

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

Sparks recently went on record as saying he is a greater novelist than Cormac McCarthy. This is true in the same sense that I am a better novelist than William Shakespeare. Sparks also said his novels are like Greek Tragedies. This may actually be true. I can't check it out because, tragically, no really bad Greek tragedies have survived.

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

We laugh, that we may not cry.

So on this day of reflection I say again, thank you for going on this journey with me. I'll see you at the movies.

2001: A Space Odyssey is not about a goal, but about a quest, a need.

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

How quickly we grow accustomed to wonders. I am reminded of the Isaac Asimov story Nightfall, about the planet where the stars were visible only once in a thousand years. So awesome was the sight that it drove people mad. We who can see the stars every night glance up casually at the cosmos and then quickly down again, searching for a Dairy Queen.

One of the most sublime and hazardous moments in human experience comes when two people lock eyes and realize that they are sexually attracted to one another. They may not act on the knowledge. They may file it away for future reference. They may deny it. They may never see each other again. But the moment has happened, and for an instant all other considerations are insignificant.

People trying to be funny are never as funny as people trying to be serious and failing.

1) the Muse visits during, not before, the act of composition, and (2) the writer takes dictation from that place in his mind that knows what he should write next. -from a review by Roger Ebert of film Starting Out In the Evening (2007). http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/p...

A depressing number of people seem to process everything literally. They are to wit as a blind man is to a forest, able to find every tree, but each one coming as a surprise.

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

My books are a subject of much discussion. They pour from shelves onto tables, chairs and the floor, and Chaz observes that I haven't read many of them and I never will. You just never know. One day I may — need is the word I use — to read Finnegans Wake, the Icelandic sagas, Churchill's history of the Second World War, the complete Tintin in French, 47 novels by Simenon, and By Love Possessed.