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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.

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
Form
Good
Things
Furniture
Piece
Pieces
Television
Art

More quotes by Pauline Kael

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Being creative is having something to sell, or knowing how to sell something, or having sold something. It has taken over what we used to mean by being wised up knowing the tricks, the shortcuts.
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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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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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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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It is a depressing fact that Americans tend to confuse morality and art (to the detriment of both) and that, among the educated, morality tends to mean social consciousness.
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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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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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tasteful and colossal are - in movies, at least - basically antipathetic.
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Trash has given us an appetite for art.
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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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I’m frequently asked why I don’t write my memoirs. I think I have.
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Her only flair is in her nostrils.
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This movie is a toupee made up to look like honest baldness.
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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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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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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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In the arts, the critic is the only independent source of information. The rest is advertising.
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I felt as if I had attended the funeral of someone I didn't know.
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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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a steady diet of mass culture is a form of deprivation.
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