Quote

Movies are so rarely great art that if we cannot appreciate great trash we have very little reason to be interested in them.

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
Interested
Movies
Art
Cannot
Littles
Reason
Trash
Little
Rarely
Great
Appreciate

More quotes by Pauline Kael

Image
What's disgusting about the Dirty Harry movies is that Eastwood plays this angry tension as righteous indignation.
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
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
I am mystified. I know only one person who voted for Nixon.
Pauline Kael
Image
Her only flair is in her nostrils.
Pauline Kael
Image
What this generation was bred to at television's knees was not wisdom, but cynicism.
Pauline Kael
Image
The critical task is necessarily comparative, and younger people do not truly know what is new
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
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
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
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
Image
Great movies are rarely perfect movies.
Pauline Kael
Image
I’m frequently asked why I don’t write my memoirs. I think I have.
Pauline Kael
Image
Irresponsibility is part of the pleasure of all art it is the part the schools cannot recognize.
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
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
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
For perhaps most Americans, TV is an apppliance, not to be used selectively but to be turned on - there's always something to watch.
Pauline Kael
Image
If you use Hollywood as the test tissue for mankind, what could the prognosis be?
Pauline Kael