Quote

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.

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
Something
Tricks
Sell
Sells
Knowing
Creative
Taken
Used
Shortcuts
Mean
Sold

More quotes by Pauline Kael

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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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The first prerogative of an artist in any medium is to make a fool of himself.
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I am mystified. I know only one person who voted for Nixon.
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It's sometimes discouraging to see all of a director's movies, because there's so much repetition. The auteurists took this to be a sign of a director's artistry, that you could recognize his movies. But it can also be a sign that he's a hack.
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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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If you use Hollywood as the test tissue for mankind, what could the prognosis be?
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Movies are our cheap and easy expression, the sullen art of displaced persons.
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It seems likely that many of the young who don't wait for others to call them artists, but simply announce that they are, don't have the patience to make art.
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Great movies are rarely perfect movies.
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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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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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The worst thing about movie-making is that it's like life: nobody can go back to correct the mistakes.
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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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Art doesn't come in measured quantities: it's got to be too much or it's not enough.
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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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This movie is a toupee made up to look like honest baldness.
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Protagonists are always loners, almost by definition.
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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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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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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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