Roger Ebert

Parents and schools should place great emphasis on the idea that it is all right to be different. Racism and all the other 'isms' grow from primitive tribalism, the instinctive hostility against those of another tribe, race, religion, nationality, class or whatever. You are a lucky child if your parents taught you to accept diversity.

"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."

I began to realize that I had tended to avoid some people because of my instant conclusions about who they were and what they would have to say. I discovered that everyone, speaking honestly and openly, had important things to tell me.

Don’t waste time on how it starts until you know how it ends,

Of all the arts, movies are the most powerful aid to empathy, and good ones make us into better people.

Your life is over when you stop living it. If you can truly retire you had a job but not an occupation.

Drama holds a mirror up to life, but needn't reproduce it.

"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."

Neither the mob nor Vegas could exist if most people weren't optimists

I have been here before, I am here now, I will be here again.

When you're young you don't realize that at every age you are always in the present, and in that sense no older;

One of my delights in these books, on the other hand, has been to include movies not often cited as “great” — some because they are dismissed as merely popular (Jaws, Raiders of the Lost Ark), some because they are frankly entertainments (Planes, Trains and Automobiles, Rififi), some because they are too obscure (The Fall of the House of Usher, Stroszek). We go to different movies for different reasons, and greatness comes in many forms.

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

All I know is, it is better to be the whale than the squid.

We laugh, that we may not cry.