Roger Ebert

"In thinking about 'depressing movies,' many people don't realize that all bad movies are depressing, and no good movies are."

"The sad thing is that when movies like this fail, executives think that proves there's no audience for unusual, original pictures - because they think they've made one."

"No matter what they're charging to get in, it's worth more to get out."

"It's not what a movie is about, it's how it is about it."

"So much of what happens by chance forms what becomes your life."

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

"On Hayao Miyazaki I told Miyazaki I love the "gratuitous motion" in his films; instead of every movement being dictated by the story, sometimes people will just sit for a moment, or they will sigh, or look in a running stream, or do something extra, not to advance the story but only to give the sense of time and place and who they are."We have a word for that in Japanese," he said, "It's called ma. Emptiness. It's there intentionally."Is that like the "pillow words" that separate phrases in Japanese poetry? "I don't think it's like the "pillow word." He clapped his hands three or four times. "The time in between my clapping is ma. If you just have non-stop action with no breathing space at all, it's just busyness, but if you take a moment, then the tension building in the film can grow into a wider dimension. If you just have constant tension at 80 degrees all the time you just get numb."

"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."

"I was instructed long ago by a wise editor, "If you understand something you can explain it so that almost anyone can understand it. If you don't, you won't be able to understand your own explanation." . . . Jargon is the last refuge of the scoundrel."

"I know it is coming, and I do not fear it, because I believe there is nothing on the other side of death to fear"

"I believe empathy is the most essential quality of civilization."

"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."

"Socrates told us, "the unexamined life is not worth living." I think he's calling for curiosity, more than knowledge. In every human society at all times and at all levels, the curious are at the leading edge."

"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."

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

"To my knowledge, no one in or out of the field has ever been able to cite a game worthy of comparison with the great dramatists, poets, filmmakers, novelists and composers. That a game can aspire to artistic importance as a visual experience, I accept. But for most gamers, video games represent a loss of those precious hours we have available to make ourselves more cultured, civilized and empathetic."

"We laugh, that we may not cry."

"Sometimes two people will regard each other over a gulf too wide to ever be bridged, and know immediately what could have happened, and that it never will."

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

"Gene [Siskel] often mentioned something François Truffaut once told him: the most beautiful sight in a movie theater is to walk down to the front, turn around, and look at the light from the screen reflected on the upturned faces of the members of the audience."