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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
Fool
Artist
Firsts
First
Make
Prerogative
Medium
Mediums

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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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I’m frequently asked why I don’t write my memoirs. I think I have.
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a steady diet of mass culture is a form of deprivation.
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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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I felt as if I had attended the funeral of someone I didn't know.
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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.
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Great movies are rarely perfect movies.
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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.
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Trash has given us an appetite for art.
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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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Movies are our cheap and easy expression, the sullen art of displaced persons.
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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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In the arts, the critic is the only independent source of information. The rest is advertising.
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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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What this generation was bred to at television's knees was not wisdom, but cynicism.
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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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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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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.
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At the movies, we are gradually being conditioned to accept violence as a sensual pleasure. The directors used to say they were showing us its real face and how ugly it was in order to sensitize us to its horrors. You don't have to be very keen to see that they are now in fact desensitizing us.
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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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