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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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Pauline Kael
Age: 82 †
Born: 1919
Born: June 19
Died: 2001
Died: September 3
Film Critic
Journalist
Writer
Petaluma
California
Movie
Making
Back
Thing
Correct
Life
Mistakes
Like
Nobody
Mistake
Worst

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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.
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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.
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All our advertising is propaganda, of course, but it has become so much a part of our life, is so pervasive, that we just don't know what it is propaganda for.
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For perhaps most Americans, TV is an apppliance, not to be used selectively but to be turned on - there's always something to watch.
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a steady diet of mass culture is a form of deprivation.
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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.
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It's sometimes discouraging to see all of a director's movies, because there's so much repetition. The auteurists took this to be a sign of a director's artistry, that you could recognize his movies. But it can also be a sign that he's a hack.
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If you use Hollywood as the test tissue for mankind, what could the prognosis be?
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Trash has given us an appetite for art.
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Television as we have it isn't an art form - it's a piece of furniture that is good for a few things.
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I’m frequently asked why I don’t write my memoirs. I think I have.
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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.
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in show business there's not much point in asking yourself if someone really likes you or if he just thinks you can be useful to him, because there's no difference.
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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.
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I am mystified. I know only one person who voted for Nixon.
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The first prerogative of an artist in any medium is to make a fool of himself.
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Irresponsibility is part of the pleasure of all art it is the part the schools cannot recognize.
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What this generation was bred to at television's knees was not wisdom, but cynicism.
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Picasso has a volatile, explosive presence. He seems to take art back to an earlier function, before the centuries of museums and masterpieces he is the artist as clown, as conjurer, as master funmaker.
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Her only flair is in her nostrils.
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