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
Creative
Taken
Shortcuts
Used
Sold
Mean
Tricks
Something
Sell
Sells
Knowing

More quotes by Pauline Kael

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The first prerogative of an artist in any medium is to make a fool of himself.
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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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The critical task is necessarily comparative, and younger people do not truly know what is new
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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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Television as we have it isn't an art form - it's a piece of furniture that is good for a few things.
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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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What's disgusting about the Dirty Harry movies is that Eastwood plays this angry tension as righteous indignation.
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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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Movies are our cheap and easy expression, the sullen art of displaced persons.
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tasteful and colossal are - in movies, at least - basically antipathetic.
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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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a steady diet of mass culture is a form of deprivation.
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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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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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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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Great movies are rarely perfect movies.
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I’m frequently asked why I don’t write my memoirs. I think I have.
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This movie is a toupee made up to look like honest baldness.
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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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