Words matter. These are the best Harold Ramis Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
You can’t not have feelings about country clubs, whichever side you’re on.
I always claim that the writer has done 90 percent of the director’s work.
The simple idiot’s advice I give to screenwriters who say they want to sell a screenplay is, ‘Write good.’
You just make sure you don’t screw it up. It’s going to work as long as you don’t mess it up. Hopefully you have plenty of those moments in a big comedy.
I used to be married to a woman who pursued every spiritual trend with tremendous passion and dragged me along. I don’t believe in anything. I’d seen mediums and readers.
A psychologist said to me, there are only two important questions you have to ask yourself. What do you really feel? And, what do you really want? If you can answer those two, you probably can leave your neuroses behind you.
I was raised Jewish and fully embrace the core beliefs of Judaism – the ones that I identify as core beliefs, which are essentially freedom and justice. But the supernatural aspects of religion were never important to me.
I’d like to think I’d never do a gratuitous fart joke.
As a director on ‘The Office,’ there’s a tremendous weight that comes with directing features. I was being asked to direct a show that had already won an Emmy for Best Comedy. Steve Carell and the cast had already won the Screen Actor’s Guild Awards.
I believe things happen that can’t be explained, but so many people seem intent on explaining them. Everyone has an answer for them. Either aliens or things from the spirit world.
I can’t imagine a successful comedy movie without a successful comedy performance at the heart of it.
The comic edge of ‘Ghostbusters’ will always be the same. It’s still treating the supernatural with a totally mundane sensibility.
If life only has the meaning you bring to it, we have the opportunity to bring rich meaning to our lives by the service we do for others.
There’s a personal story of my own that I will write at some point, and it’s a film that I will happily make. It could very well be the next thing I do, unless someone shows me something great.
The best description of the Old Testament that I heard was that it starts out as mythology, then it becomes legend, then it becomes history. In the mythological period – there is a distinct mythological period in the Old Testament, where the time spans are impossible and really just imagined.
There was a moment when we were casting ‘Groundhog Day’ when Bill Murray was not at the top of my list. He’d been getting crankier and crankier. By the end of ‘Ghostbusters II’, he was pretty cranky. I thought, ‘Do I want to put up with this for twelve weeks?’
The first comedy screenplay that I wrote was Animal House and I always thought I could and should be a director but no one was about to give me that opportunity on Animal House.
That’s one of the great things about DVD: In addition to reaching people who didn’t catch the movie in theaters, you get to have this interaction of sorts.
There’s a critic that I love, Manohla Dargis of the ‘L.A. Weekly.’ I like the underground point of view; it’s my old radical sympathies. Maybe I like her because she likes my movies.
Life doesn’t care about your vision. Stuff happens, and you’ve just got to deal with it. You roll with it; that’s the beauty of it all.
How one handles success or failure is determined by their early childhood.
Chicago still remains a Mecca of the Midwest – people from both coasts are kind of amazed how good life is in Chicago and what a good culture we’ve got. You can have a pretty wonderful artistic life and never leave Chicago.
The cutting room is where you discover the optimal length of the movie.
You probably can’t name more than a handful of comedies that would qualify for Best Picture. I can think of a lot of comedy screenplays; Woody Allen has had numerous nominations for his screenplays. But most comedies are calculated. They tend to pander. They’re not about anything important.
My first few films were institutional comedies, and you’re on pretty safe ground when you’re dealing with an institution that vast numbers of people have experienced: college, summer camp, the military, the country club.
I would remake ‘Club Paradise.’ I thought the story was cool, the setting was great. Everything lined up, except I wrote it for Bill Murray and John Cleese.
I’m not a believer in the pratfall. I don’t think it’s funny just to have someone fall down.
Whenever a critic mentions the salary of an actor, I’m thinking, He’s not talking about the movie.
I feel a big obligation to the audience, almost in a moral sense, to say something useful. If I’m going to spend a year of my life on these things, I want something that I feel that strongly about.
My only conclusion about structure is that nothing works if you don’t have interesting characters and a good story to tell.
No matter what I have to say, I’m still trying to say it in comedic form.
My characters aren’t losers. They’re rebels. They win by their refusal to play by everyone else’s rules.
If the only ideas you had were your own, you’d be very limited.
