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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
Tends
Wherever
Direct
History
Reality
Like
People

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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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Irresponsibility is part of the pleasure of all art it is the part the schools cannot recognize.
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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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This movie is a toupee made up to look like honest baldness.
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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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In a foreign country people don't expect you to be just like them, but in Los Angeles, which is infiltrating the world, they don't consider that you might be different because they don't recognize any values except their own. And soon there may not be any others.
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The critical task is necessarily comparative, and younger people do not truly know what is new
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Trash has given us an appetite for art.
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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.
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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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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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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.
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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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Art doesn't come in measured quantities: it's got to be too much or it's not enough.
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In the arts, the critic is the only independent source of information. The rest is advertising.
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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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I’m frequently asked why I don’t write my memoirs. I think I have.
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What's disgusting about the Dirty Harry movies is that Eastwood plays this angry tension as righteous indignation.
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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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