Top 93 Quotes & Sayings by Pauline Kael

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

Trash has given us an appetite for art.

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

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

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.

Moviegoers like to believe that those they have made stars are great actors. People used to say that Gary Cooper was a fine actor probably because when they looked in his face they were ready to give him their power of attorney.

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.

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.

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

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

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

Sex is the great leveler, taste the great divider.

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.

If it took some effort to see old movies, we might try to find out which were the good ones, and if people saw only the good ones maybe they would still respect old movies. As it is, people sit and watch movies that audiences walked out on thirty years ago.

Protagonists are always loners, almost by definition.

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.

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.

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

Picasso has a volatile, explosive presence. He seems to take art back to an earlier function, before the centuries of museums and masterpieces; he is the artist as clown, as conjurer, as master funmaker.

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.

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.

We will never know the extent of the damage movies are doing to us, but movie art, it appears, thrives on moral chaos. When the country is paralyzed, the popular culture may tell us why. After innocence, winners become losers. Movies are probably inuring us to corruption; the sellout is the hero-survivor for our times.

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.

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.

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

An artist must either give up art or develop.

It is a depressing fact that Americans tend to confuse morality and art (to the detriment of both) and that, among the educated, morality tends to mean social consciousness.

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.

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

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

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.

We read critics for the perceptions, for what they tell us that we didn't fully grasp when we saw the work. The judgments we can usually make for ourselves.

Before seeing Truffaut 's Small Change, I was afraid it was going to be one of those simple, natural films about childhood which I generally try to avoid I'm just not good enough to go to them. But this series of sketches on the general theme of the resilience of children turns out to be that rarity a poetic comedy that's really funny.

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

Movies are a combination of art and mass medium, but television is so single in its purpose-selling-that it operates without that painful, poignant mixture of aspiration and effort and compromise.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

I believe that we respond most and best to work in any art form (and to other experience as well) if we are pluralistic, flexible, relative in our judgments, if we are electic.

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

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

Watching old movies is like spending an evening with those people next door. They bore us, and we wouldn't go out of our way to see them; we drop in on them because they're so close. If it took some effort to see old movies, we might try to find out which were the good ones, and if people saw only the good ones maybe they would still respect old movies. As it is, people sit and watch movies that audiences walked out on thirty years ago. Like Lot's wife, we are tempted to take another look, attracted not by evil but by something that seems much more shameful -- our own innocence.

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

Good movies make you care, make you believe in possibilities again. If somewhere in the Hollywood-entertainment world someone has managed to break through with something that speaks to you, then it isn’t all corruption. The movie doesn’t have to be great; it can be stupid and empty and you can still have the joy of a good performance, or the joy in just a good line. An actor’s scowl, a small subversive gesture, a dirty remark that someone tosses off with a mock-innocent face, and the world makes a little bit of sense.

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

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