All I require of a religion is that it be tolerant of those who do not agree with it.

A lot of people just go to movies that feed into their preexisting and not so noble needs and desires: They just go to action pictures, and things like that.

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...

Not only can I not describe the plot of this movie, but I have a feeling the last scene reverses half of what I thought I knew (or didn’t know).

I think most people are more susceptible to prejudice than to reason.

The children of Birmingham did not really die in the State of Alabama, however, because Alabama is a state of mind, and in the minds of the [white] men who rule Alabama, those children had...

His career can be summed up as the case of a man who needed a financial manager.

The Academy is paranoid about its image.

Every great film should seem new every time you see it.

All over the web there are some very good critics and it’s become for people who are interested. It’s become a very good way to get to reviews and involve yourself in discussions.

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.

A corner is important. It provides privacy and an anchor and lets you exist independently of the room.

If there is such a thing as a lock on an Oscar nomination, … Hoffman has one.

I think that probably the – I don’t give quotes to studios. They have to get those out of the paper or from television. So they wouldn’t have had my quote opening day.

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

It was her unconvincing, elusive self-defense that continued to damn her.

The movies that are made more thoughtfully or made or with more ambition often get just get drowned out by the noise.

The Batman movie I’ve been waiting for.

And I think both the left and the right should celebrate people who have different opinions, and disagree with them, and argue with them, and differ with them, but don’t just try to shut them...

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

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.

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

I think we have to get beyond the idea that we have to categorize people.

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.

Seeing the film over and over again, year after year, I find it never grows over-familiar. It plays like a favorite musical album; the more I know it, the more I like it.

The prevailing style in the mainstream is represented by Michael Bay. This is shorter and shorter takes and less and less dialogue.

The target audience didn’t care that we hated those movies because they just expected us to hate them.

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.

When I write, I fall into the zone many writers, painters, musicians, athletes, and craftsmen of all sorts seem to share: In doing something I enjoy and am expert at, deliberate thought falls aside and...

Dear Bill (O’Reilly)…I am concerned that you have been losing touch with reality recently. Did you really say you are more powerful than any politician?That reminds me of the famous story about Squeaky the Chicago...

A lot of people didn’t [have sex] in high school in the 1950s, … My favorite actors include Robert Mitchum and Clint Eastwood . They don’t look anything like me.

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.

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...

The early years were pretty rocky, there were a lot of fights, a lot of disagreements, some edginess, … Gradually, I think, we came to really enjoy doing this show and really respect the other...

The right really dominates radio, and it’s amazing how much energy the right spends telling us that the press is slanted to the left when it really isn’t. They want to shut other people up....

Most of us do not consciously look at movies.

But the fact is, most people are not going to be rich someday.

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...

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...

I don’t think he’s an a-, … But if he’s going to persist in making bad movies, he’s going to have to grow accustomed to reading bad reviews.

I’m kind of glad the web is sort of totally anarchic. That’s fine with me.

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

Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress

We can now have action movies with two stars where one might be African American and one might be Asian American. One of them doesn’t have to be white, and the other one doesn’t have...

I am utterly bored by celebrity interviews. Most celebrities are devoid of interest.

By going to the movies, and because of other things, too, going to college, making a wide variety of friends, moving around traveling, I became a lot more open-minded than the heritage I was born...

I believe empathy is the most essential quality of civilization.

A work is not about what it is about. It is about how it is about what it is about.

To say that George Lucas cannot write a love scene is an understatement; greeting cards have expressed more passion,

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,...