Pauline Kael Quotes

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

When a picture can't make it on its own, the producers pull in a 'controversial' message - the way a couple whose marriage is falling apart decide to have a baby.

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

Protagonists are always loners, almost by definition.

Trash has given us an appetite for art.

Her only flair is in her nostrils.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

For some strange reason we don't go to charming, light movies anymore. People expect a movie to be heavy and turgid, like "American Beauty." We've become a heavy-handed society.

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

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

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

What is getting older if it isn't learning more ways that you're vulnerable?

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.

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.

An artist must either give up art or develop.

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

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.

in show business there's not much point in asking yourself if someone really likes you or if he just thinks you can be useful to him, because there's no difference.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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?

Movies, far more than the traditional arts, are tied to big money. Without a few independent critics, there's nothing between the public and the advertisers.

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.