Quote

If a movie is really working, you forget for two hours your Social Security number and where your car is parked. You are having a vicarious experience. You are identifying, in one way or another, with the people on the screen.

Roger Ebert

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Roger Ebert
Age: 70 †
Born: 1942
Born: June 18
Died: 2013
Died: April 4
Film Critic
Journalist
Presenter
Reporter
Screenwriter
Writer
Urbana
Illinois
Roger Joseph Ebert
Social
Number
Another
Numbers
Two
Security
Parked
Really
Movie
Vicarious
Way
Working
Identifying
People
Hours
Screen
Forget
Screens
Experience
Car

More quotes by Roger Ebert

Image
If there's anything I hate more than a stupid action comedy, it's an incompetent stupid action comedy. It's not so bad it's good. It's so bad it's nothing else but bad.
Roger Ebert
Image
But the fact is, most people are not going to be rich someday.
Roger Ebert
Image
What's sad about not eating is the experience, whether at a family reunion or at midnight by yourself in a greasy spoon under the L tracks. The loss of dining, not the loss of food.
Roger Ebert
Image
I am, beneath everything else, a fan. I was fixed in this mode as a young boy and am awed by people who take the risks of performance.
Roger Ebert
Image
In Hollywood, 'under development' means 'all I have is the title.'
Roger Ebert
Image
I am proudly a liberal. I am also patriotic, reasonable, pro-American, and stand for family values.
Roger Ebert
Image
There must be a better reason to have a baby than to provide a plot point in a rom-com. Don't you think?
Roger Ebert
Image
It is human nature to look away from illness. We don't enjoy a reminder of our own fragile mortality. That's why writing on the Internet has become a lifesaver for me. My ability to think and write have not been affected. And on the Web, my real voice finds expression.
Roger Ebert
Image
Families and their problems go on and on, and they aren't solved, they're dealt with.
Roger Ebert
Image
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.
Roger Ebert
Image
Film has become a marketed commodity, and the opportunities and audiences for art cinema have grown smaller. There is a general downturn in cultural literacy, perhaps because of television.
Roger Ebert
Image
'Marley' does what is probably the best possible job of documenting an important life.
Roger Ebert
Image
Under no circumstances will I ever purchase anything offered to me as the result of an unsolicited e-mail message. Nor will I forward chain letters, petitions, mass mailings, or virus warnings to large numbers of others. This is my contribution to the survival of the online community.
Roger Ebert
Image
What every human being should do is eat a vegetarian diet based on whole foods. Period.
Roger Ebert
Image
There is a part of me that will forever want to be walking under autumn leaves, carrying a briefcase containing the works of Shakespeare and Yeats and a portable chess set. I will pass an old tree under which once on a summer night I lay on the grass with a fragrant young woman and we quoted e.e. cummings back and forth.
Roger Ebert
Image
It's the worst kind of bad film: the kind that gets you all worked up and then lets you down, instead of just being lousy from the first shot.
Roger Ebert
Image
Going to a movie so you won't be offended is like eating potato chips made with Olestra you avoid the dangers of the real thing, but your insides fill up with synthetic runny stuff.
Roger Ebert
Image
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.
Roger Ebert
Image
We exist to have our wealth moved up the economic chain out of our reach.
Roger Ebert
Image
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. That is why 90% of academic film theory is bullshit. Jargon is the last refuge of the scoundrel.
Roger Ebert