aleskot:

“Dear Roger,

I’m not going to pretend that we were close; nonetheless, you were my friend. You were generous and supportive, and I never properly expressed to you how much your generosity and support meant to me. You were the only person I’ve ever asked for advice.

When I learned that you’d died, I had just filed a review for your website. I was about to start wrapping up one for this site—a pan of Simon Killer. I no longer feel like working on that review. I don’t feel like writing about bad movies at all. I want to write about good movies and good people.

In the past 24 hours, I’ve given several interviews about your death and what it meant to work with you. The thing that I’ve tried to stress in all of them—aside from your generosity—is that good criticism always comes from a place of love. A critic’s credibility depends on their honesty, and their love for a medium and its possibilities. You had both.”

Ignatiy Vishnevetsky on Roger Ebert. Read this, please.