Harold Ramis Thinking Quotations

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

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

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

When you grow up in Chicago, your whole family is counting on you to go to college and do something distinguished. The last thing you're thinking is that you're going to make a career in show business.

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

A friend of mine is trying to do a documentary where he brings Jewish and Arab comedians to occupied territories in Israel. He wants to do shows as a way of finding some comedic common denominator. When he proposed the idea to one of the officials at the Jenin refuge camp, the guy just stared at him and said, "This is not a joke to us. We don't think that laughing is the answer."

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.

The child says, "Well geesh, the institutions that I'm supposed to respect - the church and the government - they're telling me things that don't appear to be true. Either I'm crazy or they're crazy." That creates the Absurd Child. The Absurd Child is one who says, "Well, I think they're crazy." So you live in this state of alienation from your culture and your society and your family because you see this rampant bullshit around you.

I always think that the writer is doing the vast majority of the director's work, in a sense. If you're a writer who is also going to direct, you're doing all your preparation: You're already visualizing everything, you're imagining how the lines are going to be read, you see the blocking in your head, and you know the rhythm and the pacing.

Whatever bliss we think we're going to find, we may find it in brief flashes, fleeting moments that come and go. There's an impossibility to nailing down any good feeling.

I think satire is a luxury of literate middle-class people. People who are well fed and relatively secure in their beds can laugh at their troubles. They can enjoy sitcoms. For those who aren't quite so lucky, well, the irony might be lost on them.

The comic edge of Ghostbusters will always be the same. It's still treating the supernatural with a totally mundane sensibility. In the world of ghostbusting, there are certain givens. You're always going to have some new invented technology, some pseudo-science that sounds right because we drop enough familiar terms from physics and engineering, and pseudo-methodology, something that people will think they may have read something about before.

A lot of people get into serious relationships thinking they're going to heal someone with their love and attention, but it doesn't usually work out that way. You can't love somebody into a state of mental health.

Life has all of these contradictory feelings and contradictory results. People spend their whole lives struggling to get what they think they want, and even if they get it, they find that it's either not what they wanted, or it comes with so many unwanted consequences. We're always shut off from pure joy.