Quotes from Harold Ramis

I try to measure the amount of truth in a work rather than just looking at the generic distinction between comedy and drama.

The cutting room is where you discover the optimal length of the movie.

If life only has the meaning you bring to it, we have the opportunity to bring rich meaning to our lives by the service we do for others.

My first few films were institutional comedies, and you're on pretty safe ground when you're dealing with an institution that vast numbers of people have experienced: college, summer camp, the military, the country club.

'Analyze This' is a good movie because Robert De Niro and Billy Crystal are really good. But without the material to put on the play, of course, they couldn't be good. For me, it starts with the writing. I always think that the writer is doing the vast majority of the director's work, in a sense.

I really only worked for about a month on 'Meatballs.' What happened was that Ivan Reitman figured out that studios wanted to meet everybody involved with 'Animal House' except the producer. So he thought he'd better start directing.

Comedy and tragedy co-exist. You can't have one without the other. I'm of the school that anything can be funny if seen from a comedic point of view.

Life doesn't care about your vision. Stuff happens, and you've just got to deal with it. You roll with it; that's the beauty of it all.

If the only ideas you had were your own, you'd be very limited.

Some people have a fear of rejecting all the security that comes with family, church and state. They become fundamentalists.

Billy Crystal knows how to make people laugh. He's got 30 years on stage... there's no telling him what's funny.

I look for the meaning in what's funny, and I look for what's funny about things that are meaningful to me.