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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
People
Nuts
Shouldn
Drive
Understand
Really

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I’m frequently asked why I don’t write my memoirs. I think I have.
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I am mystified. I know only one person who voted for Nixon.
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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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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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What this generation was bred to at television's knees was not wisdom, but cynicism.
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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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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 felt as if I had attended the funeral of someone I didn't know.
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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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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.
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a steady diet of mass culture is a form of deprivation.
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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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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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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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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.
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