Quote

tasteful and colossal are - in movies, at least - basically antipathetic.

Pauline Kael

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Pauline Kael
Age: 82 †
Born: 1919
Born: June 19
Died: 2001
Died: September 3
Film Critic
Journalist
Writer
Petaluma
California
Movie
Tasteful
Colossal
Basically
Movies
Least

More quotes by Pauline Kael

Image
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
Image
The first prerogative of an artist in any medium is to make a fool of himself.
Pauline Kael
Image
What this generation was bred to at television's knees was not wisdom, but cynicism.
Pauline Kael
Image
The worst thing about movie-making is that it's like life: nobody can go back to correct the mistakes.
Pauline Kael
Image
What's disgusting about the Dirty Harry movies is that Eastwood plays this angry tension as righteous indignation.
Pauline Kael
Image
Great movies are rarely perfect movies.
Pauline Kael
Image
Her only flair is in her nostrils.
Pauline Kael
Image
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
Image
I felt as if I had attended the funeral of someone I didn't know.
Pauline Kael
Image
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
Image
Really, it's not people who don't understand us who drive us nuts—it's when those who shouldn't, do.
Pauline Kael
Image
It seems likely that many of the young who don't wait for others to call them artists, but simply announce that they are, don't have the patience to make art.
Pauline Kael
Image
It's sometimes discouraging to see all of a director's movies, because there's so much repetition. The auteurists took this to be a sign of a director's artistry, that you could recognize his movies. But it can also be a sign that he's a hack.
Pauline Kael
Image
The critical task is necessarily comparative, and younger people do not truly know what is new
Pauline Kael
Image
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.
Pauline Kael
Image
In the arts, the critic is the only independent source of information. The rest is advertising.
Pauline Kael
Image
Irresponsibility is part of the pleasure of all art it is the part the schools cannot recognize.
Pauline Kael
Image
I am mystified. I know only one person who voted for Nixon.
Pauline Kael
Image
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.
Pauline Kael
Image
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