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a steady diet of mass culture is a form of deprivation.

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
Culture
Form
Deprivation
Diet
Diets
Steady
Mass

More quotes by Pauline Kael

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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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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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tasteful and colossal are - in movies, at least - basically antipathetic.
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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 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.
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The first prerogative of an artist in any medium is to make a fool of himself.
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I am mystified. I know only one person who voted for Nixon.
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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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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 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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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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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.
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Trash has given us an appetite for art.
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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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The critical task is necessarily comparative, and younger people do not truly know what is new
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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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Allowing for exceptions, there is still one basic difference between the traditional arts and the mass-media arts: in the traditional arts, the artist grows in a mass medium, the artist decays profitably.
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If you use Hollywood as the test tissue for mankind, what could the prognosis be?
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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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Protagonists are always loners, almost by definition.
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