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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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Pauline Kael
Age: 82 †
Born: 1919
Born: June 19
Died: 2001
Died: September 3
Film Critic
Journalist
Writer
Petaluma
California
Drive
Understand
Really
People
Nuts
Shouldn

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What's disgusting about the Dirty Harry movies is that Eastwood plays this angry tension as righteous indignation.
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Movies are so rarely great art that if we cannot appreciate great trash we have very little reason to be interested in them.
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This movie is a toupee made up to look like honest baldness.
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tasteful and colossal are - in movies, at least - basically antipathetic.
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I felt as if I had attended the funeral of someone I didn't know.
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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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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.
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Great movies are rarely perfect movies.
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I am mystified. I know only one person who voted for Nixon.
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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.
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a steady diet of mass culture is a form of deprivation.
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The first prerogative of an artist in any medium is to make a fool of himself.
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In the arts, the critic is the only independent source of information. The rest is advertising.
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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.
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I’m frequently asked why I don’t write my memoirs. I think I have.
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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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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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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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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.
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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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