Quote

What this generation was bred to at television's knees was not wisdom, but cynicism.

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
Wisdom
Political
Bred
Cynicism
Knees
Generation
Generations
Television

More quotes by 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
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.
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
Her only flair is in her nostrils.
Pauline Kael
Image
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.
Pauline Kael
Image
The words Kiss Kiss Bang Bang which I saw on an Italian movie poster, are perhaps the briefest statement imaginable of the basic appeal of movies
Pauline Kael
Image
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.
Pauline Kael
Image
If you use Hollywood as the test tissue for mankind, what could the prognosis be?
Pauline Kael
Image
In the arts, the critic is the only independent source of information. The rest is advertising.
Pauline Kael
Image
Really, it's not people who don't understand us who drive us nuts—it's when those who shouldn't, do.
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
Trash has given us an appetite for art.
Pauline Kael
Image
The first prerogative of an artist in any medium is to make a fool of himself.
Pauline Kael
Image
The slender, swift Bruce Lee was the Fred Astaire of martial arts, and many of the fights that could be merely brutal come across as lightning-fast choreography.
Pauline Kael
Image
Protagonists are always loners, almost by definition.
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
I’m frequently asked why I don’t write my memoirs. I think I have.
Pauline Kael
Image
Allowing for exceptions, there is still one basic difference between the traditional arts and the mass-media arts: in the traditional arts, the artist grows in a mass medium, the artist decays profitably.
Pauline Kael
Image
Art doesn't come in measured quantities: it's got to be too much or it's not enough.
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