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The critical task is necessarily comparative, and younger people do not truly know what is new

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
Task
Tasks
Necessarily
Critical
Truly
People
Comparative
Younger

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Art doesn't come in measured quantities: it's got to be too much or it's not enough.
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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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The first prerogative of an artist in any medium is to make a fool of himself.
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In a foreign country people don't expect you to be just like them, but in Los Angeles, which is infiltrating the world, they don't consider that you might be different because they don't recognize any values except their own. And soon there may not be any others.
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I am mystified. I know only one person who voted for Nixon.
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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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Her only flair is in her nostrils.
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Reality, like God and History, tends to direct people to wherever they want to go.
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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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Irresponsibility is part of the pleasure of all art it is the part the schools cannot recognize.
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tasteful and colossal are - in movies, at least - basically antipathetic.
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Movies have been doing so much of the same thing - in slightly different ways - for so long that few of the possibilities of this great hybrid art have yet been explored.
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Robert Redford ... has turned almost alarmingly blond-he's gone past platinum, he must be into plutonium his hair is coordinated with his teeth.
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a steady diet of mass culture is a form of deprivation.
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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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Movies are our cheap and easy expression, the sullen art of displaced persons.
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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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In the arts, the critic is the only independent source of information. The rest is advertising.
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Trash has given us an appetite for art.
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