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Movies are our cheap and easy expression, the sullen art of displaced persons.

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
Art
Persons
Displaced
Sullen
Cheap
Expression
Movies
Movie
Easy

More quotes by Pauline Kael

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Robert Redford ... has turned almost alarmingly blond-he's gone past platinum, he must be into plutonium his hair is coordinated with his teeth.
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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.
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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.
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Trash has given us an appetite for art.
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a steady diet of mass culture is a form of deprivation.
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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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The worst thing about movie-making is that it's like life: nobody can go back to correct the mistakes.
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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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I felt as if I had attended the funeral of someone I didn't know.
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Great movies are rarely perfect movies.
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If you use Hollywood as the test tissue for mankind, what could the prognosis be?
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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.
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I am mystified. I know only one person who voted for Nixon.
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For perhaps most Americans, TV is an apppliance, not to be used selectively but to be turned on - there's always something to watch.
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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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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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tasteful and colossal are - in movies, at least - basically antipathetic.
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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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Good movies make you care, make you believe in possibilities again.
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Reality, like God and History, tends to direct people to wherever they want to go.
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