Harold Ramis Quotes

"I'm at my best when I'm working with really talented people, and I'm there to gently suggest or guide or inspire or contribute whatever I can to their effort."

"I never work just to work. It's some combination of laziness and self-respect."

"How one handles success or failure is determined by their early childhood."

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

"Comedy and tragedy co-exist. You can't have one without the other. I'm of the school that anything can be funny if seen from a comedic point of view."

"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?"

"Films are big hits when they touch a lot of people. Things are not funny in a vacuum, they're funny because we respond to some personal dislocation, some embarrassment, some humiliation, some pain we've suffered, or some desire we have."

"I'm not a believer in the pratfall. I don't think it's funny just to have someone fall down."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"Acting is all about big hair and funny props... All the great actors knew it. Olivier knew it, Brando knew it."

"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."

"As much as we'd like to believe that our work is great and that we're infallible, we're not. Hollywood movies are made for the audience. These are not small European art films we're making."

"Billy Crystal knows how to make people laugh. He's got 30 years on stage... there's no telling him what's funny."

"I always claim that the writer has done 90 percent of the director's work."

"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."

"I had a lot of fun working with John Candy. We had a pretty good rapport."

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

"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."

"I'd like to think I'd never do a gratuitous fart joke."

"I've been directing for 25 years almost, and I've only directed nine films in that time because I like to be careful."

"If Chevy Chase had not been an actor, he might have been a very popular guy in advertising, or whatever field he would have gone into, because of his charisma."

"It's like the old rule-if you introduce a gun into the first act of a play, it's going to be used in the third act. So if you do a movie about criminals, you have to accept there's going to be Some action."

"Multiplicity was a movie that tested really well. People seeing the movie really liked it, but then the studio couldn't market it. We opened on a weekend with nine other films."

"My characters aren't losers. They're rebels. They win by their refusal to play by everyone else's rules."

"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."

"My job is to come up with something that you like and you agree with that you would play wholeheartedly. If we disagree, I may not be doing my job correctly."

"No matter what I have to say, I'm still trying to say it in comedic form."