- Carl Reiner, Himself: Amazing stuff. It's surreal. I think nobody ever would dare. He has no fear or he's crazy
- Quentin Tarantino, Himself: One of the things that always bugged me about comedians when I was a little boy, because I really liked comedy, I really liked comedians, was the fact that they had to be weaker than the other males in the movie. They had to be infantile. They had to act like a blithering idiot. Or, they had to be cowards. Or, they had to be scared. The joke is that Bob Hope is standing up against Jesse James. That always bugged me! Why do they have to be lesser than? Why can't they be males? Why can't they be masculine? And Buster Keaton was that. And he put himself against guys who were taller than him. So, he always had a slight like height deficit. He was a real, exciting hero.
- Cybill Shepherd, Herself: He's such a great director. He puts himself in these impossible situations. It's definitely underplayed and, therefore, I think is more powerful.
- Dick Van Dyke, Himself: I stole as many moves as I could from him. Buster said you hit the ground with your hands as you're going down and it absorbs some of the impact. And it works!
- Dick Van Dyke, Himself: Such control of his body. Such agility. He was like a ballet dancer. Incredible control of his body!
- Werner Herzog, Himself: In a way, Buster Keaton is the essence of movies. He is one of the inventors of cinema.
- Leonard Maltin, Himself: He's really doing what you see. Which is true in almost all of his films. What you see is what you get. And to me the best special effect in those films is Buster.
- Narrator: For all his own shorts and features, except for "The General," Buster never had a script. He and his people would come up with a good beginning and then figure out a satisfying finish. As he used to say, "the middle would take care of itself."
- Cybill Shepherd, Herself: Acting is in the eyes. Not the face. It shows you how little you have to do sometimes. To sell something, you don't try to sell it. Just, be natural.
- Dick Cavett, Himself: [the Dick Caveat Show, January 21, 1972] Why did Keaton hit the skids? That seems to me one of the sad mysteries of Hollywood.
- Frank Capra, Himself: Well, he was essentially a pantomime artist. And when sound came along they - the pantomime artists went out of business, really. And also they were killed by - by something brand new: cartoons.
- Peter Bogdanovich, Himself: Chuck Jones who directed most of the great Bugs Bunny and Roadrunner cartoons and he said he was totally influenced by Buster Keaton.
- Carl Reiner, Himself: He was born to be a silent movie comedian; because, his face - his non-expressive face expressed so much.
- Narrator: According to Buster's father, Joe, it was the famous magician Harry Houdini, a personal friend of the Keatons, after watching the kid fall down a flight of stairs unhurt at the age of six months, who said, "That's some buster your kid took." Now, it may not have been Houdini who said it, but, what the hell. Buster in those days was known to mean a fall. Nothing could have been more appropriate.
- Quentin Tarantino, Himself: For Keaton, cinema was important. It wasn't the camera nailed to the floor or nailed to the moving truck. It was jokes that worked because of the movie camera. It was cinema itself that became the joke.
- Carl Reiner, Himself: I think a lot of my daring, in terms of breaking the fourth wall, came from Keaton, who, when Sherlock Jr. pointed out: it's a movie. And I'm *always* pointing out, somewhere in my films, that we're making a movie.
- Jon Watts, Himself: It's such a strange thing to watch the Fatty Arbuckle ones, while were he's still making big facial expressions and doing all this sort of tropes of the era. When you see that start to fade away, it was just effortless. It's the stone face performance. It's not forcing you to laugh. For me, that just made me laugh.
- Dick Van Dyke, Himself: Even he couldn't explain it. I said, "Was film speeded up?" He said, "No." How he did that was superhuman. There were no tricks. He just did it!
- Dick Van Dyke, Himself: So many things happened on the spur of the moment. He said he would get an idea and just do it.
- James Karen, Himself: His first marriage, which ended so badly, he said I wasn't the best husband in the world either. He said, "What are you gonna do when you walk into your dressing room and there's a naked girl standing there waiting for you?" I said, "Did that happen?" He said, "It happened all the time."
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