Harold Ramis Quotes

I just feel as though it's become a situation where people have manifested this caricature of who I am, and they act as if there's no real person inside of it.

People want me to be funny all the time. They think I'm being funny no matter what I say or do and that's not the case.

I've never really understood that. It's a funny thing; people sometimes accuse us of condescending to our characters somehow-that to me is kind of inexplicable.

I want to show people that I'm not what everybody thought I was.

Once people take time to find out who I really am you'd be surprised

What I do is to collaborate with each actor and work one-on-one to create a character. And that is a matter of huge complexity and is a combination of a great deal of discussion and a lot of practical work. It involves a lot of consideration for the real people out there, and all kinds of sources of real people. The result is the character. But I'm not supposed to talk about what it is we do, because it's nobody's business.

When I'm writing, especially when I'm writing in first person, I don't think about the characterization, or how they are going to express themselves, I just express my own approach to these things. I think most writers can never divorce themselves from their private lives and personas; they are the ones that are writing. And the more they remove themselves from their own persona, the more, perhaps, mechanical the work becomes.

The fact is most of the things that people know about me are made up. My own life is backstage. So what you "know" about me is only what I allowed you to know about me.

As an actor, you're just taking temperature. I am anyway, all the time, and responding appropriately. I was again cast very last-minute for Rushmore and met Wes Anderson, this quite physically and socially awkward man who didn't really talk to me much, a precocious and intelligent young boy. And Bill Murray. And we were sort of left in this bizarre hotel together and taken to strange locations around Houston. That was quite an isolating experience.

Some people have called me arrogant or believe that is my reputation, which is far from what I really am like.

People in this world look at things mistakenly, and think that what they do not understand must be the void. This is not the true void. It is bewilderment.

You keep your head down and you work and work, and all of a sudden you pick your head up and people are receiving it the same way we're sending it. They're thinking the same things that I'm thinking about the show.

People think we really look good. I think that's the biggest misconception people have.

I could not sit seriously down to write a serious Romance under any other motive than to save my life, & if it were indispensable for me to keep it up & never relax into laughing at myself or other people, I am sure I should be hung before I had finished the first chapter. No - I must keep my own style & go on in my own way; and though I may never succeed again in that, I am convinced that I should totally fail in any other.

You just have to go with a good story and a script that you like and people that you like to work with.

I've never fooled anyone. I've let people fool themselves. They didn't bother to find out who and what I was. Instead they would invent a character for me. I wouldn't argue with them. They were obviously loving somebody I wasn't.

Generally, a lot of the things people think are made up are real, a lot of the things people think are real are made up, a lot of the things people think are spontaneous are cleverly faked, and a lot of the things people think are fake are spontaneous.

I avoid talking about the way I work. But in avoiding it I seem only to have encouraged people to focus their fantasies about me in an ever more fantastical way on the details that are not at all at the centre of the work.

I love working on scripts. I love coming up with ideas about what people would dress like or talk like. I love all that.

fame is merely the fact of being misunderstood by millions of people.

I hear people talk in my head and I write it down. I choose where they live and how they dress to be real. That person wouldn't wear that. That person wouldn't say that. She can't afford to live like that. All that bullshit that so many movies have in them. I don't want to see that.

I'm going to work with Dan Clowes. After Charlie Kaufman, it's hard to fill up the gap. It's hard to find somebody who... A lot of writers, I can clearly see the desire of succeeding before the desire of expressing themselves. Sometimes people get upset when you want to be different. You were talking about "whimsical," which is a nice word. But sometimes they use the word "quirky" in the pejorative sense. I get frustrated, because they feel like I'm doing whatever I want, and there is no ground, and I don't really care. They feel it's cynical. But I don't think I have any cynicism in me.

America was, to them, the place that good people went to when they died. They were prepared to believe just about anything could happen in America.

Some people made me out like the villain. I'm supposed to be the Bond villain, but actually I'm James Bond.

People will speculate about what they want, but that is not my intention.