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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.

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
Business
Shame
Back
Watching
Book
Broken
People
Becoming
Stupid
Television
Media
Rationalized
Reading
Freed

More quotes by Pauline Kael

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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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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 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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Art doesn't come in measured quantities: it's got to be too much or it's not enough.
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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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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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What this generation was bred to at television's knees was not wisdom, but cynicism.
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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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Reality, like God and History, tends to direct people to wherever they want to go.
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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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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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The worst thing about movie-making is that it's like life: nobody can go back to correct the mistakes.
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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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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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This movie is a toupee made up to look like honest baldness.
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I felt as if I had attended the funeral of someone I didn't know.
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I’m frequently asked why I don’t write my memoirs. I think I have.
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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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Trash has given us an appetite for art.
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The first prerogative of an artist in any medium is to make a fool of himself.
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