Quote

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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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 felt as if I had attended the funeral of someone I didn't know.
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Movies are our cheap and easy expression, the sullen art of displaced persons.
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Good movies make you care, make you believe in possibilities again.
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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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When I see those ads with the quote 'You'll have to see this picture twice,' I know it's the kind of picture I don't want to see once.
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 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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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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tasteful and colossal are - in movies, at least - basically antipathetic.
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I’m frequently asked why I don’t write my memoirs. I think I have.
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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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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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Art doesn't come in measured quantities: it's got to be too much or it's not enough.
Pauline Kael
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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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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.
Pauline Kael
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Trash has given us an appetite for art.
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What this generation was bred to at television's knees was not wisdom, but cynicism.
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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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