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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
Artist
Firsts
First
Make
Prerogative
Medium
Mediums
Fool

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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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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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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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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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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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Art doesn't come in measured quantities: it's got to be too much or it's not enough.
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Robert Redford ... has turned almost alarmingly blond-he's gone past platinum, he must be into plutonium his hair is coordinated with his teeth.
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If I never saw another fistfight or car chase or Doberman attack, I wouldn't have any feeling of loss. And that goes for Rottweilers, too.
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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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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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Reality, like God and History, tends to direct people to wherever they want to go.
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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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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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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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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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I felt as if I had attended the funeral of someone I didn't know.
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Protagonists are always loners, almost by definition.
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This movie is a toupee made up to look like honest baldness.
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The critical task is necessarily comparative, and younger people do not truly know what is new
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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.
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