Quote

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

Pauline Kael

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Pauline Kael
Age: 82 †
Born: 1919
Born: June 19
Died: 2001
Died: September 3
Film Critic
Journalist
Writer
Petaluma
California
Critics
Criticism
Independent
Source
Rest
Information
Critic
Business
Arts
Art
Advertising

More quotes by Pauline Kael

Image
At the movies, we are gradually being conditioned to accept violence as a sensual pleasure. The directors used to say they were showing us its real face and how ugly it was in order to sensitize us to its horrors. You don't have to be very keen to see that they are now in fact desensitizing us.
Pauline Kael
Image
tasteful and colossal are - in movies, at least - basically antipathetic.
Pauline Kael
Image
I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they are I don't know. They're outside my ken. But sometimes when I'm in a theater I can feel them.
Pauline Kael
Image
Her only flair is in her nostrils.
Pauline Kael
Image
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
Image
A good movie can take you out of your dull funk and the hopelessness that so often goes with slipping into a theatre a good movie can make you feel alive again, in contact, not just lost in another city. Good movies make you care, make you believe in possibilities again.
Pauline Kael
Image
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
Image
What this generation was bred to at television's knees was not wisdom, but cynicism.
Pauline Kael
Image
This movie is a toupee made up to look like honest baldness.
Pauline Kael
Image
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
Image
What's disgusting about the Dirty Harry movies is that Eastwood plays this angry tension as righteous indignation.
Pauline Kael
Image
For a while in the twenties and thirties, art was talked about as a substitute for religion now B movies are a substitute for religion.
Pauline Kael
Image
The first prerogative of an artist in any medium is to make a fool of himself.
Pauline Kael
Image
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
Image
Trash has given us an appetite for art.
Pauline Kael
Image
If I never saw another fistfight or car chase or Doberman attack, I wouldn't have any feeling of loss. And that goes for Rottweilers, too.
Pauline Kael
Image
Really, it's not people who don't understand us who drive us nuts—it's when those who shouldn't, do.
Pauline Kael
Image
Protagonists are always loners, almost by definition.
Pauline Kael
Image
Movies have been doing so much of the same thing - in slightly different ways - for so long that few of the possibilities of this great hybrid art have yet been explored.
Pauline Kael
Image
a steady diet of mass culture is a form of deprivation.
Pauline Kael