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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.

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
Able
Share
Ideas
Open
Avidity
Enough
High
Giddy
Feel
Talk
Excitement
Feels
Getting
Drunk
Something
Idea
Friendship
Love
Else
Built
Someone
Movies

More quotes by Pauline Kael

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Picasso has a volatile, explosive presence. He seems to take art back to an earlier function, before the centuries of museums and masterpieces he is the artist as clown, as conjurer, as master funmaker.
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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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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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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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In the arts, the critic is the only independent source of information. The rest is advertising.
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I am mystified. I know only one person who voted for Nixon.
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tasteful and colossal are - in movies, at least - basically antipathetic.
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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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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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I felt as if I had attended the funeral of someone I didn't know.
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a steady diet of mass culture is a form of deprivation.
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Reality, like God and History, tends to direct people to wherever they want to go.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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I’m frequently asked why I don’t write my memoirs. I think I have.
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Protagonists are always loners, almost by definition.
Pauline Kael