Pauline Kael Quotes.
The critic is the only independent source of information. The rest is advertising.
Trash has given us an appetite for art.
One of the surest signs of the Philistine is his reverence for the superior tastes of those who put him down.
What is getting older if it isn’t learning more ways that you’re vulnerable?
If there is any test that can be applied to movies, it’s that the good ones never make you feel virtuous.
Movies are our cheap and easy expression, the sullen art of displaced persons.
A book might be written on the injustice of the just.
Good movies make you care, make you believe in possibilities again.
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.
Movies that are consciously life-affirming are to be consciously avoided.
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.
Where there is a will, there is a way. If there is a chance in a million that you can do something, anything, to keep what you want from ending, do it. Pry the door open or, if need be, wedge your foot in that door and keep it open.
What this generation was bred to at television’s knees was not wisdom, but cynicism.
The critical task is necessarily comparative, and younger people do not truly know what is new
An artist must either give up art or develop.
Kevin Costner has feathers in his hair and feathers in his head. The Indians should have called him ‘Plays with Camera.’
I am mystified. I know only one person who voted for Nixon.
The problem with a popular art form is that those who want something more are in a hopeless minority compared with the millions who are always seeing it for the first time, or for the reassurance and gratification of seeing the conventions fulfilled again.
In the arts, the critic is the only independent source of information. The rest is advertising.
Sex is the great leveler, taste the great divider.
The first prerogative of an artist in any medium is to make a fool of himself.
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.
Citizen Kane is perhaps the one American talking picture that seems as fresh now as the day it opened. It may seem even fresher.
Movies are so rarely great art that if we cannot appreciate great trash we have very little reason to be interested in them.
a steady diet of mass culture is a form of deprivation.
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.
I see little of more importance to the future of our country and of civilization than full recognition of the place of the artist. If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him.
A mistake in judgment isn’t fatal, but too much anxiety about judgment is.
