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In the arts, the critic is the only independent source of information. The rest is advertising.

Pauline Kael

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Pauline Kael
Age: 82 †
Born: 1919
Born: June 19
Died: 2001
Died: September 3
Film Critic
Journalist
Writer
Petaluma
California
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Arts
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More quotes by Pauline Kael

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I felt as if I had attended the funeral of someone I didn't know.
Pauline Kael
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The words Kiss Kiss Bang Bang which I saw on an Italian movie poster, are perhaps the briefest statement imaginable of the basic appeal of movies
Pauline Kael
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When I see those ads with the quote 'You'll have to see this picture twice,' I know it's the kind of picture I don't want to see once.
Pauline Kael
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The romance of movies is not just in those stories and those people on the screen but in the adolescent dream of meeting others who feel as you do about what you’ve seen.
Pauline Kael
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I am mystified. I know only one person who voted for Nixon.
Pauline Kael
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The worst thing about movie-making is that it's like life: nobody can go back to correct the mistakes.
Pauline Kael
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Really, it's not people who don't understand us who drive us nuts—it's when those who shouldn't, do.
Pauline Kael
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Writers who go to Hollywood still follow the classic pattern: either you get disgusted by 'them' and you leave or you want the money and you become them.
Pauline Kael
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This movie is a toupee made up to look like honest baldness.
Pauline Kael
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Allowing for exceptions, there is still one basic difference between the traditional arts and the mass-media arts: in the traditional arts, the artist grows in a mass medium, the artist decays profitably.
Pauline Kael
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Protagonists are always loners, almost by definition.
Pauline Kael
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McLuhanism and the media have broken the back of the book business they've freed people from the shame of not reading. They've rationalized becoming stupid and watching television.
Pauline Kael
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An avidity for more is built into the love of movies. Something else is built in: you have to be open to the idea of getting drunk on movies. (Being able to talk about movies with someone -- to share the giddy high excitement you feel -- is enough for a friendship.
Pauline Kael
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Since I have an aversion to movies in which people say grace at the dinner table (not to the practice but to how movies use it to establish the moral strength of a household), the opening night montage of Sunday-night supper in one home after another in Waxahachie, Texas in 1935 - a whole community saying grace made me expect the worst.
Pauline Kael
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It seems likely that many of the young who don't wait for others to call them artists, but simply announce that they are, don't have the patience to make art.
Pauline Kael
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If you use Hollywood as the test tissue for mankind, what could the prognosis be?
Pauline Kael
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It is a depressing fact that Americans tend to confuse morality and art (to the detriment of both) and that, among the educated, morality tends to mean social consciousness.
Pauline Kael
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The first prerogative of an artist in any medium is to make a fool of himself.
Pauline Kael
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Robert Redford ... has turned almost alarmingly blond-he's gone past platinum, he must be into plutonium his hair is coordinated with his teeth.
Pauline Kael
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Movies are our cheap and easy expression, the sullen art of displaced persons.
Pauline Kael