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Good movies make you care, make you believe in possibilities again.

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
Possibility
Movies
Movie
Care
Believe
Make
Good
Possibilities

More quotes by Pauline Kael

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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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In the arts, the critic is the only independent source of information. The rest is advertising.
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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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Allowing for exceptions, there is still one basic difference between the traditional arts and the mass-media arts: in the traditional arts, the artist grows in a mass medium, the artist decays profitably.
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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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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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Reality, like God and History, tends to direct people to wherever they want to go.
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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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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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The first prerogative of an artist in any medium is to make a fool of himself.
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This movie is a toupee made up to look like honest baldness.
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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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The critical task is necessarily comparative, and younger people do not truly know what is new
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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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Trash has given us an appetite for art.
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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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I am mystified. I know only one person who voted for Nixon.
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a steady diet of mass culture is a form of deprivation.
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