"To her British lover about to climb in bed with 80-something Mae: She said that she hoped soon to be able to say what Paul Revere said — 'The British are coming'. This was the last one-liner Mae ever uttered on film."

"I'm the kinda girl who works for Paramount by day, and Fox all night"

"I used to be Snow White, but I drifted."

"You take one thing and add it to another and you get two. Two and two is four; and five'll get you ten if you know how to work it!"

"Reality is a crutch for people who can't cope with drugs."

"Reality is nothing but a collective hunch."

"Interviewer: You once said you had a drug problem... Lily: Yeah, I still do. It's so hard to find good grass these days."

"Why is it when we talk to God we're said to be praying — but when God talks to us, we're said to be schizophrenic?"

"The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win, you're still a rat."

"The best mind-altering drug is truth."

"Sometimes I worry about being a success in a mediocre world."

"If you read a lot of books, you're considered well-read. But if you watch a lot of TV, you're not considered well-viewed."

"If truth is beauty, how come no one has their hair done in the library?"

"If the formula for water is H2O, is the formula for an ice cube H2O squared?"

"If love is the answer, could you please rephrase the question?"

"For fast acting relief, try slowing down."

"Don't be afraid of missing opportunities. Behind every failure is an opportunity somebody wishes they had missed."

"Remember we're all in this alone."

"I swear people don't want sex so much as they want somebody who'll listen to 'em … the first thing you learn after fellatio is how to listen."

"Your problem is your role models were models."

"I bet the worst part about dying is the part where your whole life passes before you."

"No matter how cynical you become, it's never enough to keep up."

"Sometimes I feel like a figment of my own imagination."

"If I had known what it would be like to have it all... I might have been willing to settle for less."

"All my life, I've always wanted to be somebody, but I see now I should have been more specific."

"It's my belief we developed language because of our deep inner need to complain."

"When you're dancing the mystical dance of the molecules, you're not the one who's leading."

"Reality is the leading cause of stress amongst those in touch with it...."

"(Q: Is conversation an art form?) Oh yes. Certainly. And I have delighted in overhearing conversations that were artistic. I like to listen to people talk. I enjoyed the Dick Cavett show, because Cavett is so articulate and apparently at ease, and his guests on that show were by and large people who were very interesting to listen to, and Cavett had the knack of bringing them out. So when I watched that show, I had the sense that it was an art form. Cavett was making it artistic. (Was he creating himself as well as creating language?) Absolutely. (And there were different Cavetts? There were different selves in different circumstances?) I think he was a different man depending upon who he talked to. He was a different man every time."

"The playwright George S. Kaufman remembered what he called the “greatest ‘line reversal’ of my lifetime.” He liked to drop in on Broadway shows he had directed to, as he put it, “just check on them and take out the ‘improvements.’ ” He was eternally grateful to have caught one performance when he heard an actor commit the gem. It ran: “Her breath would take your beauty away.” He kept the line framed on his desk ever afterward."

"You can piss away valuable hours of your life reading Ayn Rand—her wretched appeal to the young, her wretched writing, her wretched person. She was supposed to be on my show; I was kind of sorry she wasn’t, because I was kind of laying for her. I did not succumb, as a kid, to being enthused by Ayn Rand, and that sense of power, as every kid was at one time until they outgrew it. The old bag sent over a list of fifteen conditions for appearing with me, or for appearing with anyone, I guess. One of them was, “There will be no disagreeing with Ms. Rand’s philosophy.” […] I wrote at the bottom of the list, to be sent back to her, “There will be no Ms. Rand, either.”"

"You can, after all, reduce the reasons for watching TV to but two: to be lulled, and to be stimulated. Some people do one sometimes, the other sometimes. Some people do all of one or all of the other."

"There's so much comedy on television. Does that cause comedy in the streets?"

"It's a rare person who wants to hear what he doesn't want to hear."

"Why don't you fold it five ways and put it where the moon don't shine."

"It's a wonderful job for people who have never had a nervous breakdown but always wanted one."

"I don't think you could say now that ABC is crasser than the other two networks. But as long as people will accept crap, it will be financially profitable to dispense it. It becomes an ever-descending spiral."

""The Lucky One" is at its heart a romance novel, elevated however by Nicholas Sparks' persuasive storytelling. Readers don't read his books because they're true, but because they ought to be true. You can easily imagine how many ways this story would probably go wrong in real life, but who wants to see a movie where a Marine leans over to pick up a photo and is blown up? And a mom trying to raise her son and feed lots of hungry dogs while her abusive ex-husband gets drunk and hangs around? That kind of stuff is too close to life."

"Here’s something you don’t hear said about many movie critics: people love Roger Ebert. … There’s a good reason for this: Ebert doesn’t stand between moviegoers and the audience. Rather, his regular readers are serious movie-lovers who see him as their rep, the guy out there fighting to make movies less stupid, more entertaining, more intelligent, more everything. You don’t have to agree with him — and I certainly didn’t in this book, when he ragged on Team America and Jesus is Magic, two movies where I laughed myself sick — to know that he’s on your side. He sees the bad movies so you don’t have to, and he’s seen the same ones over and over. … Mere bile, though, isn’t his game; he’s as interested in why movies fail as why they work. A lot of the time, it’s obvious: because it’s made by morons for morons. In these cases, Ebert drags us through the plot in as entertaining a fashion as possible. … Forty years on, he’s still a moviegoer’s best friend."

""The movies won’t be the same without Roger," the President of the United States said today in a statement upon the death of Roger Ebert, one of the most influential American writers and critics of the last quarter century. He was, to begin, a great film critic, a joyful viewer who always preached that great art and popular entertainment were not exclusive. … He was also a great essayist, and the world now begs some book publisher to come along to bind his best blog posts, if only so they can be preserved by others who loved the printed word as much as he did. But most importantly, he celebrated humanity, and the things it creates."

"Nobody has been more important in telling Americans why we should love film than Roger Ebert."

"For a generation of Americans — and especially Chicagoans — Roger was the movies. When he didn't like a film, he was honest; when he did, he was effusive — capturing the unique power of the movies to take us somewhere magical."

"I was very saddened today to hear of the death of Roger Ebert. Roger... has been my favorite film critic since forever. I did not always agree with him, but I always found him insightful and fun to read. He was not just a terrific critic, he was a terrific WRITER. .. A brilliant man, a good life. I give him two thumbs up."

"It would not be a stretch to say that Mr. Ebert was the best-known film reviewer of his generation, and one of the most trusted. The force and grace of his opinions propelled film criticism into the mainstream of American culture. Not only did he advise moviegoers about what to see, but also how to think about what they saw."

"Through his boorish, knee-jerk leftism, Ebert has become merely another Hollywood elitist thumbing his nose at America. Two thumbs down."

"Roger Ebert is a national treasure. He is the most recognizable and well known movie critic. He has been my favorite writer for some time now. I do not always agree with his opinions, which is my right, but he always backs them up. He is not someone who will say that such and such about movie X is bad and leave it at that — he will give the reasons for his thought process."