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Trash has given us an appetite for art.

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
Trash
Appetite
Given
Art

More quotes by 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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The romance of movies is not just in those stories and those people on the screen but in the adolescent dream of meeting others who feel as you do about what you’ve seen.
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I’m frequently asked why I don’t write my memoirs. I think I have.
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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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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.
Pauline Kael
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a steady diet of mass culture is a form of deprivation.
Pauline Kael
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What this generation was bred to at television's knees was not wisdom, but cynicism.
Pauline Kael
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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.
Pauline Kael
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If you use Hollywood as the test tissue for mankind, what could the prognosis be?
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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Movies are our cheap and easy expression, the sullen art of displaced persons.
Pauline Kael
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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.
Pauline Kael
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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.
Pauline Kael
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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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In the arts, the critic is the only independent source of information. The rest is advertising.
Pauline Kael
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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.
Pauline Kael
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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.
Pauline Kael
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Great movies are rarely perfect movies.
Pauline Kael
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A good movie can take you out of your dull funk and the hopelessness that so often goes with slipping into a theatre a good movie can make you feel alive again, in contact, not just lost in another city. Good movies make you care, make you believe in possibilities again.
Pauline Kael
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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.
Pauline Kael