Gene Siskel's Quotes

After 27 years, I walked out of my first one a few months ago. Black Sheep with Chris Farley.

I'm not surprised that Spielberg was able to capture the heroism of Schindler; so many of his movies are about the better part of mankind.

In fact, Cannonball Run II. I used to pick that as the worst movie ever made.

Is this film more interesting than a documentary of the same actors having lunch?

John Goodman is more that just a big guy, he's a wonderful actor.

We don't pretend to disagree.

We'd rather see a picture that we liked then dump on one we didn't.

But you know, really, if you think about it Roger and I and all critics really have one absolute essential part of our credentials and that is that you believe that that is actually what we think.

That's probably when I get the most angry at American movies, when they just so cynically manipulate the audience without even trying to give a good story.

The only actor who I think probably might have possibly taken a swing at me if he could have would be Burt Reynolds. He used to call Roger and me the Bruise Brothers, out of Chicago.

The result is a picture that represents so much of what I want and rarely get from a movie - a couple of hours filled with characters who are as exciting as the people I know in real life.

They know they got the TV ad, they know they got the name recognition, they know that they can do a tie in with McDonald's or some fast food outlet and the money is just gonna flow in.

In any art, you don't know in advance what you want to say - it's revealed to you as you say it. That's the difference between art and illustration.

Almost inevitably there are tensions in the picture, tensions between the outside world and the inside world. For me, a successful picture resolves these tensions without eliminating them.

I may be wrong, but the essential illustrative nature of most documentary photography, and the worship of the object per se, in our best nature photography, is not enough to satisfy the man of today, compounded as he is of Christ, Freud, and Marx.

Photography is a way of feeling, of touching, of loving. What you have caught on film is captured forever... it remembers little things, long after you have forgotten everything.

We look at the world and see what we have learned to believe is there. We have been conditioned to expect... but, as photographers, we must learn to relax our beliefs.