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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
Younger
Task
Tasks
Necessarily
Critical
Truly
People
Comparative

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Great movies are rarely perfect movies.
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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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The worst thing about movie-making is that it's like life: nobody can go back to correct the mistakes.
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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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a steady diet of mass culture is a form of deprivation.
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Trash has given us an appetite for art.
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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.
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Protagonists are always loners, almost by definition.
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In the arts, the critic is the only independent source of information. The rest is advertising.
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When I see those ads with the quote 'You'll have to see this picture twice,' I know it's the kind of picture I don't want to see once.
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If you use Hollywood as the test tissue for mankind, what could the prognosis be?
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Reality, like God and History, tends to direct people to wherever they want to go.
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I felt as if I had attended the funeral of someone I didn't know.
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I’m frequently asked why I don’t write my memoirs. I think I have.
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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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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 am mystified. I know only one person who voted for Nixon.
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This movie is a toupee made up to look like honest baldness.
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McLuhanism and the media have broken the back of the book business they've freed people from the shame of not reading. They've rationalized becoming stupid and watching television.
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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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