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

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
Wisdom
Political
Bred
Cynicism
Knees
Generation
Generations
Television

More quotes by Pauline Kael

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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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Writers who go to Hollywood still follow the classic pattern: either you get disgusted by 'them' and you leave or you want the money and you become them.
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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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The critical task is necessarily comparative, and younger people do not truly know what is new
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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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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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In the arts, the critic is the only independent source of information. The rest is advertising.
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This movie is a toupee made up to look like honest baldness.
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It is a depressing fact that Americans tend to confuse morality and art (to the detriment of both) and that, among the educated, morality tends to mean social consciousness.
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Reality, like God and History, tends to direct people to wherever they want to go.
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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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Great movies are rarely perfect movies.
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I’m frequently asked why I don’t write my memoirs. I think I have.
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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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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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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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I am mystified. I know only one person who voted for Nixon.
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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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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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