Pauline Kael quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Pauline Kael

Pauline Kael Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Pauline Kael on Wise Famous Quotes.

The worst thing about movie-making is that it's like life: nobody can go back to correct the mistakes.

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.

One of the surest signs of the Philistine is his reverence for the superior tastes of those who put him down.

This movie is a toupee made up to look like honest baldness.

An artist must either give up art or develop.

The first prerogative of an artist in any medium is to make a fool of himself.

In the arts, the critic is the only independent source of information. The rest is advertising.

Moviemaking is so male-dominated now that they think they're being pro-feminine when they have women punching each other out.

When we championed trash culture we had no idea it would become the only culture.

If there's anything to learn from the history of movies, it's that corruption leads to further corruption, not to innocence.

Pryor's comedy isn't based on suspiciousness about whites, or on anger, either; he's gone way past that. Whites are unbelievable to him.

Movies are our cheap and easy expression, the sullen art of displaced persons.

Citizen Kane is perhaps the one American talking picture that seems as fresh now as the day it opened. It may seem even fresher.

Part of growing up is developing a bullshit detector, and kids usually do a pretty fair job of wising each other up.

I am mystified. I know only one person who voted for Nixon.

Her only flair is in her nostrils.

Irresponsibility is part of the pleasure of all art; it is the part the schools cannot recognize.

What this generation was bred to at television's knees was not wisdom, but cynicism.

Boobs on the make always try to impress with their high level of seriousness (wise guys, with their contempt for all seriousness.

Nobody really controls a production, now; the director is on his own, even if he's insecure, careless, or nuts.

The words "Kiss Kiss Bang Bang" which I saw on an Italian movie poster, are perhaps the briefest statement imaginable of the basic appeal of movies

Reality, like God and History, tends to direct people to wherever they want to go.

I'm frequently asked why I don't write my memoirs. I think I have.

A steady diet of mass culture is a form of deprivation.

Movies that are consciously life-affirming are to be consciously avoided ...

Movies are so rarely great art that if we cannot appreciate great trash we have very little reason to be interested in them.

Robert Redford ... has turned almost alarmingly blond-he's gone past platinum, he must be into plutonium; his hair is coordinated with his teeth.

Sex is the great leveler, taste the great divider.

If you use Hollywood as the test tissue for mankind, what could the prognosis be?

Is there something in druggy subjects that encourages directors to make imitation film noir? Film noir itself becomes an addiction.

We may be reaching the end of the era in which individual movies meant something to people. In the new era, movies may just mean a barrage of images.

Imagining [The Wizard of Oz] without Judy Garland is a bit like dancing on wet cement: you can do it, but why would you want to?

If you're afraid of movies that excite your senses, you're afraid of movies.

Trash has given us an appetite for art.

A book might be written on the injustice of the just.

There is, in any art, a tendency to turn one's own preferences into a monomaniac theory.

Great movies are rarely perfect movies.

What's disgusting about the Dirty Harry movies is that Eastwood plays this angry tension as righteous indignation.

I felt as if I had attended the funeral of someone I didn't know.

Television represents what happens to a medium when the artists have no power and the businessmen are in full, unquestioned control.

The critical task is necessarily comparative, and younger people do not truly know what is new

There is something spurious about the very term 'a movie made for TV,' because what you make for TV is a TV program.

Protagonists are always loners, almost by definition.

Kevin Costner has feathers in his hair and feathers in his head. The Indians should have called him 'Plays with Camera.'

Tasteful and colossal are - in movies, at least - basically antipathetic.

If there is any test that can be applied to movies, it's that the good ones never make you feel virtuous.

Television as we have it isn't an art form - it's a piece of furniture that is good for a few things.

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.

Economy, speed, nervousness, and desperation produce the final wasteful, semi-incoherent movies we see.

Vulgarity is not as destructive to an artist as snobbery.

For perhaps most Americans, TV is an apppliance, not to be used selectively but to be turned on - there's always something to watch.

Art doesn't come in measured quantities: it's got to be too much or it's not enough.

Really, it's not people who don't understand us who drive us nuts - it's when those who shouldn't, do.

Good movies make you care, make you believe in possibilities again.

A mistake in judgment isn't fatal, but too much anxiety about judgment is.

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.