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I am mystified. I know only one person who voted for Nixon.

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
Mystified
Nixon
Voted
Persons
Person

More quotes by 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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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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Great movies are rarely perfect movies.
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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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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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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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Art doesn't come in measured quantities: it's got to be too much or it's not enough.
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At the movies, we are gradually being conditioned to accept violence as a sensual pleasure. The directors used to say they were showing us its real face and how ugly it was in order to sensitize us to its horrors. You don't have to be very keen to see that they are now in fact desensitizing us.
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Reality, like God and History, tends to direct people to wherever they want to go.
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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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Her only flair is in her nostrils.
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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.
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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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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 this generation was bred to at television's knees was not wisdom, but cynicism.
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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.
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In the arts, the critic is the only independent source of information. The rest is advertising.
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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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tasteful and colossal are - in movies, at least - basically antipathetic.
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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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