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

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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
Hours
Screen
People
Forget
Screens
Experience
Car
Social
Number
Another
Numbers
Security
Parked
Two
Movie
Vicarious
Really
Working
Identifying
Way

More quotes by Roger Ebert

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Valentines Day is being marketed as a Date Movie. I think its more of a First-Date Movie. If your date likes it, do not date that person again. And if you like it, there may not be a second date.
Roger Ebert
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What a terrible thing it would be to be the Pope! What unthinkable responsibilities to fall on your shoulders at an advanced age! No privacy. No seclusion. No sin.
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I've been around a long time, and young men, if there is one thing I know, it is that the only way to kiss a girl for the first time is to look like you want to and intend do, and move in fast enough to seem eager but slow enough to give her a chance to say So anyway ... and look up as if she's trying to remember your name.
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To make others less happy is a crime. To make ourselves unhappy is where all crime starts. We must try to contribute joy to the world. That is true no matter what our problems, our health, our circumstances. We must try. I didn't always know this and am happy I lived long enough to find it out.
Roger Ebert
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I'll tell you, I think that the Internet has provided an enormous boost to film criticism by giving people an opportunity to self publish or to find sites that are friendly.
Roger Ebert
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It's rare to find a film that goes for broke and says, 'To hell with the consequences.'
Roger Ebert
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But the fact is, most people are not going to be rich someday.
Roger Ebert
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All I require of a religion is that it be tolerant of those who do not agree with it.
Roger Ebert
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Because I don't give the studios advanced quotes or an advanced look at my reviews. I think the readers deserve to read my reviews before the studios do.
Roger Ebert
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I wear a pedometer, a little device that counts every step. It works as a goad, because you walk additional distances to pile up the numbers. The average person walks 2,000 to 3,000 steps a day. I walk 10,000 steps a day. I have lost a lot of weight as a result.
Roger Ebert
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Steve Coogan picks up enough to lecture an interviewer: This is a postmodern novel before there was any modernism to be post about. Later it's claimed that Tristram Shandy was No. 8 on the Observer's list of the greatest novels, which cheers everyone until they discover the list was chronological.
Roger Ebert
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Open-heart surgery is now part of a typical life experience for many people. Folks talk casually about 'having a stent put in,' as if they had their tires rotated.
Roger Ebert
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Movies are not about moving, but about whether to move.
Roger Ebert
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The buried code of many American films has become: If I kill you, I have won and you have lost. The instinctive ethical code of traditional Hollywood, the code by which characters like James Stewart, John Wayne and Henry Fonda lived, has been lost.
Roger Ebert
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If you want to save yourself the ticket price, go into the kitchen, cue up a male choir singing the music of hell, and get a kid to start banging pots and pans together. Then close your eyes and use your imagination.
Roger Ebert
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Matthew McConaughey and Kate Hudson star. I neglected to mention that, maybe because I was trying to place them in this review's version of the Witness Protection Program. If I were taken off the movie beat and assigned to cover the interior design of bowling alleys, I would have some idea of how they must have felt as they made this film.
Roger Ebert
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And yet, even so, there is a way to find happiness. That is to be curious about all of the interlocking events that add up to our lives. To notice connections. To be amused or perhaps frightened by the ways things work out. If the universe is indifferent, what a consolation that we are not.
Roger Ebert
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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
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Low self esteem involves imagining the worst that other people can think about you.
Roger Ebert
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All good art is about something deeper than it admits.
Roger Ebert