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The first prerogative of an artist in any medium is to make a fool of himself.

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
Firsts
First
Make
Prerogative
Medium
Mediums
Fool
Artist

More quotes by Pauline Kael

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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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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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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.
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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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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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Art doesn't come in measured quantities: it's got to be too much or it's not enough.
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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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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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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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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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The worst thing about movie-making is that it's like life: nobody can go back to correct the mistakes.
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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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Movies are so rarely great art that if we cannot appreciate great trash we have very little reason to be interested in them.
Pauline Kael
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Really, it's not people who don't understand us who drive us nuts—it's when those who shouldn't, do.
Pauline Kael
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I felt as if I had attended the funeral of someone I didn't know.
Pauline Kael
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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.
Pauline Kael
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Her only flair is in her nostrils.
Pauline Kael
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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.
Pauline Kael
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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.
Pauline Kael
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tasteful and colossal are - in movies, at least - basically antipathetic.
Pauline Kael