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Great movies are rarely perfect movies.

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
Movies
Perfect
Great
Rarely

More quotes by Pauline Kael

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I am mystified. I know only one person who voted for Nixon.
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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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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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I’m frequently asked why I don’t write my memoirs. I think I have.
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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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If you use Hollywood as the test tissue for mankind, what could the prognosis be?
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In a foreign country people don't expect you to be just like them, but in Los Angeles, which is infiltrating the world, they don't consider that you might be different because they don't recognize any values except their own. And soon there may not be any others.
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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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Movies are our cheap and easy expression, the sullen art of displaced persons.
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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 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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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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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
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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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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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I felt as if I had attended the funeral of someone I didn't know.
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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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Reality, like God and History, tends to direct people to wherever they want to go.
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The first prerogative of an artist in any medium is to make a fool of himself.
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What's disgusting about the Dirty Harry movies is that Eastwood plays this angry tension as righteous indignation.
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