It's not what a movie is about, it's how it is about it.
I believe empathy is the most essential quality of civilization.
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.
Life always has an unhappy ending, but you can have a lot of fun along the way, and everything doesn't have to be dripping in deep significance.
Doing research on the Web is like using a library assembled piecemeal by pack rats and vandalized nightly.
What I believe is that all clear-minded people should remain two things throughout their lifetimes: Curious and teachable.
We are put on this planet only once, and to limit ourselves to the familiar is a crime against our minds.
Every great film should seem new every time you see it." Roger Ebert
The Muse visits during the process of creation, not before.
The Muse visits during the act of creation, not before. Don't wait for her. Start alone.
If you have to ask what it symbolizes, it didn't.
All I require of a religion is that it be tolerant of those who do not agree with it.
There are no guarantees. But there is also nothing to fear. We come from oblivion when we are born. We return to oblivion when we die. The astonishing thing is this period of in-between.
Of what use is freedom of speech to those who fear to offend?
Nicholas 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.
Of all the purposes of education, I think the most useful is this: It prepares you to keep yourself entertained. It gives you a better chance of an interesting job.
In thinking about 'depressing movies,' many people don't realize that all bad movies are depressing, and no good movies are.
Start. Don’t look back. If at the end it doesn’t meet your hopes, start again. Now you know more about your hopes.
A corner is important. It provides privacy and an anchor and lets you exist independently of the room.
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?
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.
The very fact of snow is such an amazement.
Your intellect may be confused, but your emotions will never lie to you.
So much of what happens by chance forms what becomes your life.
No matter what they're charging to get in, it's worth more to get out.
It’s hard to explain the fun to be found in seeing the right kind of bad movie.
We are poor mortals, but it dreams to us that we can fly.
All I know is, it is better to be the whale than the squid.
Aren't you getting tired of people hating one another? What do they think they get out of it?
I find that when I am actually writing, I enter a zone of concentration too small to admit my troubles.
Gene Siskel used to describe old-age makeup as making young actors look like turtles.
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.
Never marry someone who doesn’t love the movies you love. Sooner or later, that person will not love you.
That's how I gained a lifelong fondness for repeating certain phrases beyond the point of all reason.
2001: A Space Odyssey is not about a goal, but about a quest, a need.
We laugh, that we may not cry.
Dogs remember every favor you ever do for them and store those events in a memory bank titled Why My Human Is A God.
In my reviews, I feel it's good to make it clear that I'm not proposing objective truth, but subjective reactions; a review should reflect the immediate experience.
As we leave the theater, we are absolutely convinced that the only thing keeping the world from going crazy is that the problems of three little people do, after all, amount to more than a hill of beans.
When you're young you don't realize that at every age you are always in the present, and in that sense no older;
Films are no longer concerned with the silence of God, but with the chattering of men.
Entertainment is about the way things should be. Art is about the way they are.
I am not a believer, not an atheist, not an agnostic. I am more content with questions than answers.
The ability of an audience to enter into the narrative arc of a movie is being lost; do today’s audiences have the patience to wait for Harry Lime in The Third Man?
You are never warmer than when you have been cold.
There must be something deep within our memory as a species that is pleased by being able to look at what is making us warm.
Of all the arts, movies are the most powerful aid to empathy, and good ones make us into better people.
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.
People trying to be funny are never as funny as people trying to be serious and failing.
Drama holds a mirror up to life, but needn't reproduce it.
So much of what happens by chance forms what becomes of your life….I suppose I must be grateful, for I seem to have been headed this way all along.
I have been here before, I am here now, I will be here again.
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.
If you don’t flush out the pipes, they’ll run brown.
The Toys of a Lifetime
You can't say it wasn't interesting.
A work is not about what it is about. It is about how it is about what it is about.
And the sexes eyeing each other uneasily, for nothing is easier for a teenager to imagine than rejection.
As the man says in the play, for this relief, much thanks.
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
Anyone who has the price of a newspaper should have a fair chance of understanding most of what’s written in it,
Don’t waste time on how it starts until you know how it ends,
Because an American can have a double-barreled last name but there is little practice for a triple-barreled one.
A man goes to the movies. The critic must admit that he is this man.
They give you a smaller glass so it feels like you’re getting more,
[Orson Welles] was a man who made the greatest film ever made and was never forgiven for it.
Perhaps it is the nature of man not to wish to know too much about his own nature.