Quote

Really, it's not people who don't understand us who drive us nuts—it's when those who shouldn't, do.

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
Nuts
Shouldn
Drive
Understand
Really
People

More quotes by Pauline Kael

Image
In the arts, the critic is the only independent source of information. The rest is advertising.
Pauline Kael
Image
Television as we have it isn't an art form - it's a piece of furniture that is good for a few things.
Pauline Kael
Image
What this generation was bred to at television's knees was not wisdom, but cynicism.
Pauline Kael
Image
I am mystified. I know only one person who voted for Nixon.
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
a steady diet of mass culture is a form of deprivation.
Pauline Kael
Image
The first prerogative of an artist in any medium is to make a fool of himself.
Pauline Kael
Image
What's disgusting about the Dirty Harry movies is that Eastwood plays this angry tension as righteous indignation.
Pauline Kael
Image
Reality, like God and History, tends to direct people to wherever they want to go.
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
The romance of movies is not just in those stories and those people on the screen but in the adolescent dream of meeting others who feel as you do about what you’ve seen.
Pauline Kael
Image
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.
Pauline Kael
Image
Being creative is having something to sell, or knowing how to sell something, or having sold something. It has taken over what we used to mean by being wised up knowing the tricks, the shortcuts.
Pauline Kael
Image
Robert Redford ... has turned almost alarmingly blond-he's gone past platinum, he must be into plutonium his hair is coordinated with his teeth.
Pauline Kael
Image
This movie is a toupee made up to look like honest baldness.
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
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.
Pauline Kael
Image
Protagonists are always loners, almost by definition.
Pauline Kael
Image
The critical task is necessarily comparative, and younger people do not truly know what is new
Pauline Kael
Image
The worst thing about movie-making is that it's like life: nobody can go back to correct the mistakes.
Pauline Kael