Harold Ramis

“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.”

“If the only ideas you had were your own, you'd be very limited.”

“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.”

“With both Caddyshack and Vacation, it's not like the subjects were serious enough that they engaged my interest for another round. I love the characters, and the actors were great, but I didn't see the need to make another Vacation movie.”

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

“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.”

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

“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 would happily have done any of the 'Bourne Identity' sequels. There are good sequels, but I'm not good at making them.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“The cutting room is where you discover the optimal length of the movie.”

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

“It seems that, culturally, young people function more in groups. They know each other through digital media. All the young comedy people who work in TV are really used to working at the table with lots of writers around. They're comfortable in the group; they don't assert their own egos over everyone else.”

“I always point out to my Passover guests that the Hebrews were not living in isolation. They were at the crossroads of several great, elaborate cultures with their own mythology and religion and art and architecture and cultural belief. In fact, so many of the mythologies of the world describe the same events, just from different points of view.”

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

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