Quote

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

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
Easy
Art
Persons
Displaced
Sullen
Cheap
Expression
Movies

More quotes by Pauline Kael

Image
Irresponsibility is part of the pleasure of all art it is the part the schools cannot recognize.
Pauline Kael
Image
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.
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
If you use Hollywood as the test tissue for mankind, what could the prognosis be?
Pauline Kael
Image
The critical task is necessarily comparative, and younger people do not truly know what is new
Pauline Kael
Image
Great movies are rarely perfect movies.
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
Art doesn't come in measured quantities: it's got to be too much or it's not enough.
Pauline Kael
Image
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
Pauline Kael
Image
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
Image
This movie is a toupee made up to look like honest baldness.
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
Image
The first prerogative of an artist in any medium is to make a fool of himself.
Pauline Kael
Image
Her only flair is in her nostrils.
Pauline Kael
Image
I’m frequently asked why I don’t write my memoirs. I think I have.
Pauline Kael
Image
In the arts, the critic is the only independent source of information. The rest is advertising.
Pauline Kael
Image
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
Image
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.
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
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.
Pauline Kael