Harold Ramis Quotes

Whenever a critic mentions the salary of an actor, I'm thinking, He's not talking about the movie.

First and foremost, you have to make the movie for yourself. And that's not to say, to hell with everyone else, but what else have you got to go on but your own taste and judgment?

I never read Playboy before I started working there and stopped reading it the day I quit.

My only conclusion about structure is that nothing works if you don't have interesting characters and a good story to tell.

We were tremendously encouraged by the testing of Analyze That. Audiences loved it. They were telling us that they liked it as much as the original. We recorded the laughs in the theater.

We all wish we could be in more than one place at the same time. People with families feel guilty all the time-if we spend too much time with our family, we feel we're not working hard enough.

You can't love somebody into a state of mental health.

Most people live somewhere on the spectrum of anxiety and depression.

I look for the meaning in what's funny, and I look for what's funny about things that are meaningful to me.

It doesn't take any longer to improvise 10 takes than it takes to shoot 10 takes of the same thing. It turns out to be just as responsible from a business point of view as anything else.

If people offer me decent roles in good films, of course I'll take it. But I just didn't like the actor lifestyle. You end up focusing all your energy on trying to get parts you don't even want.

I learned over the years that it's easy to appear smart referencing things that people don't know.

I met someone who said they'd figured out my genre: "madcap redemption comedy." I'll buy that.

You can perceive life as tragic, or you can laugh at the tragedy of it and that turns it into comedy. It doesn't change the circumstances.

Most comedies are calculated. They tend to pander. They're not about anything important.

Stand-up is every man for himself; you learn from hanging out at these clubs and watching other guys, and then trying not to be like them.

I've always thought that comedy was just another dramatic expression.

At a certain point, you have to convince the actors that you've done the right thing. The way I work, if I can't convince them, I've got to move on. I can't coerce them or browbeat them.

When someone's an actor and you're an actor, you meet them and you feel like you know them. We're in the same business, and we all speak the same comedy language.

The times change, and to the extent that comedy captures the spirit of the times, it will enjoy success.

I think of myself as a real writer, not just someone who dabbles in it, so I deserve some credit.

I've always had that overweening desire to be liked by the audience.

For me, most comedy scripts fail in the mechanical playing-out of the setup. They'll pay lip service to a moral lesson or a psychological progression.

There's something very edgy about Bill Murray out there improvising.

I'm thinking of doing a marital comedy for one of the studios, but I want it to be so painful that it'll have a profound effect on married couples who see it together.

Most comedy is not very ambitious. You probably can't name more than a handful of comedies that would qualify for Best Picture.

I can't imagine a successful comedy movie without a successful comedy performance at the heart of it.

It's a great luxury for me to be able to write on the films that I direct, and kind of a nice thing to be able to write enough to get credit, which is difficult for a director.

When you're a big enough part of the process that the Writers Guild gives you a lot of credit, that's a good thing. It tells me that I've had a significant impact on the film as a writer.