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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.

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
Seems
Centuries
Volatile
Back
Presence
Explosive
Take
Master
Explosives
Function
Picasso
Masters
Clown
Century
Masterpiece
Artist
Earlier
Conjurer
Art
Museums
Masterpieces

More quotes by Pauline Kael

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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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This movie is a toupee made up to look like honest baldness.
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I felt as if I had attended the funeral of someone I didn't know.
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Good movies make you care, make you believe in possibilities again.
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Since I have an aversion to movies in which people say grace at the dinner table (not to the practice but to how movies use it to establish the moral strength of a household), the opening night montage of Sunday-night supper in one home after another in Waxahachie, Texas in 1935 - a whole community saying grace made me expect the worst.
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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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The worst thing about movie-making is that it's like life: nobody can go back to correct the mistakes.
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What this generation was bred to at television's knees was not wisdom, but cynicism.
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Trash has given us an appetite for art.
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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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Movies are our cheap and easy expression, the sullen art of displaced persons.
Pauline Kael
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The critical task is necessarily comparative, and younger people do not truly know what is new
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The first prerogative of an artist in any medium is to make a fool of himself.
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Reality, like God and History, tends to direct people to wherever they want to go.
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What's disgusting about the Dirty Harry movies is that Eastwood plays this angry tension as righteous indignation.
Pauline Kael
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I am mystified. I know only one person who voted for Nixon.
Pauline Kael
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Her only flair is in her nostrils.
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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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.
Pauline Kael