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Reality, like God and History, tends to direct people to wherever they want to go.

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
Like
People
Tends
Wherever
Direct
History
Reality

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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.
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Great movies are rarely perfect movies.
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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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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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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.
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tasteful and colossal are - in movies, at least - basically antipathetic.
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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.
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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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Trash has given us an appetite for art.
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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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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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Good movies make you care, make you believe in possibilities again.
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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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If you use Hollywood as the test tissue for mankind, what could the prognosis be?
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The slender, swift Bruce Lee was the Fred Astaire of martial arts, and many of the fights that could be merely brutal come across as lightning-fast choreography.
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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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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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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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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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a steady diet of mass culture is a form of deprivation.
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