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

More quotes by Pauline Kael

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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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The first prerogative of an artist in any medium is to make a fool of himself.
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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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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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Protagonists are always loners, almost by definition.
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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.
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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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Her only flair is in her nostrils.
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a steady diet of mass culture is a form of deprivation.
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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 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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What's disgusting about the Dirty Harry movies is that Eastwood plays this angry tension as righteous indignation.
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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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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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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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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.
Pauline Kael
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Great movies are rarely perfect movies.
Pauline Kael
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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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Movies are so rarely great art that if we cannot appreciate great trash we have very little reason to be interested in them.
Pauline Kael