Roger Ebert Quotes

"Gene was a lifelong friend and our professional competition only strengthened that bond, ... He showed great bravery in the months after his surgery, continuing to work as long as he could."

"The secret of the movie is that it doesn't strain to draw parallels with current world events - because it doesn't have to."

"The target audience didn't care that we hated those movies because they just expected us to hate them."

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

"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."

"I don't think Bush was legitimately elected President."

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

"The prevailing style in the mainstream is represented by Michael Bay. This is shorter and shorter takes and less and less dialogue."

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"The Academy is paranoid about its image."

"We don't have a lot of class-conscious filmmaking."

"Your intellect may be confused, but your emotions will never lie to you."

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

"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."

"Most of us do not consciously look at movies."