Pauline Kael Quotes

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. ~ Pauline Kael

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. ~ Pauline Kael

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

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

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. ~ Pauline Kael

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. ~ Pauline Kael

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. ~ Pauline Kael

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

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

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

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. ~ Pauline Kael

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

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

A steady diet of mass culture is a form of deprivation. ~ Pauline Kael

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. ~ Pauline Kael

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

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. ~ Pauline Kael

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. ~ Pauline Kael

Pauline Kael said that Rip Torn could get angrier faster than any other American actor: that he could go from zero to 10 in 1.8 seconds or something like that. ~ John Heard

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

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

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. ~ Pauline Kael

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. ~ Pauline Kael

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

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. ~ Pauline Kael

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

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

I was really influenced by Joan Didion and Pauline Kael; they were both at the height of their influence when I was coming into my own as a reader. ~ Caitlin Flanagan

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

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

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

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. ~ Pauline Kael

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? ~ Pauline Kael

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

In San Francisco, vulgarity, "bad taste," ostentation are regarded as a kind of alien blight, an invasion or encroachment from outside. In Los Angeles, there is so much money and power connected with ostentation that is no longer ludicrous: it commands a kind of respect. For if the mighty behave like this, then quiet good taste means that you can't afford the conspicuous expenditures, and you become a little ashamed of your modesty and propriety. ~ Pauline Kael

The movies have been so rank the last couple of years that when I see people lining up to buy tickets I sometimes think that the movies aren't drawing an audience - they're inheriting an audience. People just want to go to a movie. They're stung repeatedly, yet their desire for a good movie - for any movie - is so strong that all over the country they keep lining up. ~ Pauline Kael

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. ~ Pauline Kael

Once, I got slaughtered after 'Blade Runner' by Pauline Kael: three pages of slaughter. I was so offended, I would never read any more press. ~ Ridley Scott

Great movies are rarely perfect movies. ~ Pauline Kael

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

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. 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. Sitting there alone or painfully alone because those with you do not react as you do, you know there must be others perhaps in this very theatre or in this city, surely in other theatres in other cities, now, in the past or future, who react as you do. And because movies are the most total and encompassing art form we have, these reactions can seem the most personal and, maybe the most important, imaginable. 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. You do meet them, of course, and you know each other at once because you talk less about good movies than about what you love in bad movies. ~ Pauline Kael

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. ~ Pauline Kael

A country which accepts wars as contests between good and evil is suffering from the delusion that the morality play symbolizes real political conflicts. ~ Pauline Kael

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

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

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. ~ Pauline Kael

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. ~ Pauline Kael

Trash has given us an appetite for art. ~ Pauline Kael

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

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

There seems to be an assumption that if you're offended by movie brutality, you are somehow playing into the hands of the people who want censorship. But this would deny those of us who don't believe in censorship the use of the only counter-balance: the freedom of the press to say that there's anything conceivably damaging in these films - the freedom to analyze their implications ... How can people go on talking about the dazzling brilliance of movies and not notice that the directors are sucking up to the thugs in the audience? ~ Pauline Kael

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. ~ Pauline Kael

Sex is the great leveler, taste the great divider. ~ Pauline Kael

Good movies make you care, make you believe in possibilities again. ~ Pauline Kael

Vulgarity is not as destructive to an artist as snobbery. ~ Pauline Kael

Her only flair is in her nostrils. ~ Pauline Kael

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 ~ Pauline Kael

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. ~ Pauline Kael

Sometimes it's moments like that, real complicated moments, absorbing moments, that make you realize that even hard times have things in them that make you feel alive. And then there's music, and girls, and drugs, and homeless people who've read Pauline Kael, and wah-wah pedals, and English potato chip flavors, and I haven't even read Martin Chuzzlewit yet ... There's plenty out there. ~ Nick Hornby

I'll admit that I was surprised to see two decades of film journalism canonized in the same church as Lincoln, Thoreau, Emerson, Walt Whitman, and Emily Dickinson; that's a fairly loose canon. ~ William Zinnser

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

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. ~ Pauline Kael

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

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. ~ Pauline Kael

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

Protagonists are always loners, almost by definition. ~ Pauline Kael

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

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

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. ~ Pauline Kael

An artist must either give up art or develop. ~ Pauline Kael

She recalled how Pauline had fallen off a bus one night, late, went skidding into Creedmoor. In a novel, it would have portended the fall they were all about to take ~ Alice McDermott

The British security industry has the capacity to be a world leader and it should be our shared objective to achieve this. ~ Pauline Neville-Jones

Instead of ignoring her infirmity, pretending it was not there, he made it seem like something special and endearing. For the first time Pauline felt that her bad foot was an asset ~ Toni Morrison

We all think we're liberated when we have more of everything, don't we? That's what the media tell us. ~ Pauline Collins

Death has no age limits; that is why we should appreciate each moment of life by getting to know God and doing all we can to love others through works of Faith. ~ Pauline Seaport

Success is different for everyone; to be successful does not mean it has to be understood or defined by what the world defines it as. ~ Pauline Seaport

=== God's deposit is great inside u, the prophet only calls it out ~ Ikechukwu Joseph

Realize this – your anger with God does not drive a wedge between you and Him. It is your silence that drives the wedge. - Prodigal Life ~ Pauline Creeden

Independence is counterfeit freedom. We think if we can make all our own choices and do our own thing, we will be free. But the opposite is true. By trying to be independent, we are attempting to take God's place as the ruler of our lives. We can never succeed at creating happiness because we are the created, not the Creator. ~ Pauline Creeden

We all press buttons in relationships, in our dealings with people, without thinking what it really means. We all knock along without questioning what kind of situation we're in. We may often be in a very good one, but we don't even appreciate the good situations. We're lazy. Or we're scared. Or we just don't notice. ~ Pauline Collins

Her freedom was worse than any chains. ~ Pauline Reage

Ambiguous loss makes us feel incompetent. It erodes our sense of mastery and destroys our belief in the world as a fair, orderly, and manageable place. But if we learn to cope with uncertainty, we must realize that there are differing views of the world, even when that world is less challenged by ambiguity . . . If we are to turn the corner and cope with uncertain losses, we must first temper our hunger for mastery. This is the paradox. ~ Pauline Boss

Is that all?" he blurted out.
Crowley and Halt exchanged slightly puzzled glances. Then Crowley pursed his lips thoughtfully.
"Um…it seems to be…Listed your trainging, mentioned a few achievements, made sure you know which end of an arrow is the sharp part…decided your new name…I think that's…" Then it seemed that understanding dawned on him and his eyes opened wide.
"Of course! You have to have you Silver…whatsis, don 't you?" He took hold of the chain that held his own Silver Oakleaf around his throat and shook it lightly. It was a badge of a Graduate Ranger. Then he began to search through his pockets, frowning.
"Had it here! Had it here! Where the devil is it…wait. I heard something fall on the boards as I came in! Must have dropped it. Just check outside the front door, will you, Will?"
Too stunned to talk, Will rose and went to the door. As he set his hand on the latch, he looked back at the two Rangers, still seated at the table. Crowley made a small shooing motion with the back of his hand, urging him to go outside. Will was still looking back at them when he opened the door and stepped through on the verandah.
"Congratulations!"
The massive cry went up from at least forty throats. He swung around in shock to find all his friends gathered in the clearing outside around the table laid for a feast, their faces beaming with smiles. Baron Arald, Sir Rodney, Lady Pauline and Master Chubb were all there. So were Jenny and George, his forme ~ John Flanagan

Perhaps if we could be more flexible about family roles and who the family is, we would have less ambivalence toward loved ones were partially absent or present. ~ Pauline Boss

My writing has always been a rather non-linear process. I've found if I get something down, I can listen to it and other things start to come. ~ Pauline Oliveros

I joined the PQ in the 1970s because of the issue of sovereignty. And that's why I wake up in the morning. A woman who gives birth to a country, that would be interesting. ~ Pauline Marois

Never give a golfer an ultimatum unless you're prepared to lose. ~ Pauline Phillips

This was the kind of moral dilemma Pauline often got her into. Mr. Someone-or-Other, Pauline had mouthed. Adele at lunch with him, crying. But Mr. Who? She turned to her typewriter, Pauline's eyes still on her. She would like to ask "Who?" - but to do so, in that same mouthing whisper Pauline had used, would be to enter too fully into Pauline's tale, Pauline's bitter triumph, and, in some way, into Pauline's unhappy life. But Mr. Who? ~ Alice McDermott

The night folded around them with a sweetness and poignancy heightened by the new pale stars that prickled silver fire in the water of the lily ponds, by the scented winds, and by the nearness of each other. ~ Pauline Gedge

Refuse to put others either above you or below you, but instead see them as you. ~ Pauline Holyoak

Griff held out his empty hand. "Pauline, I'm here asking you--begging you, if it comes to that--to take my hand. Just take my hand, and promise before God you will never let it go. I will vow the same. Can we arrange for that to happen, someday soon? In a church?" After a moment, he added in a quiet voice, "Please? ~ Tessa Dare

Well! I'm glad you didn't call him a buffoon." "Or pompous," Pauline added. "Or ignorant," Jeb chimed in. "Or an ass," Kaden said. "I didn't call him an ass." Rafe grunted. "You may as well have." Now ~ Mary E. Pearson

That the female of the species was as cruel as, and more implacable than, the male, O had never doubted for a minute. ~ Pauline Reage

Halt," said the elegant diplomat, "when you asked me to marry you, did you think we could just sneak off to a glade in the woods with a few close friends and get it done?"
Halt hesitated. "Well, no ... of course not."
As a matter of fact, that was exactly what he had thought. A simple ceremony, a few friends, some food and drink and then he and Pauline would be a couple. But he felt that it might not be wise to admit that right now. ~ John Flanagan

He whom one awaits is, because he is expected, already present, already master. ~ Pauline Reage

We don't know what proportion of public funds is regularly lost to collusion and corruption. Is it 25 per cent? 30 per cent? We do know that a portion of these public funds are feeding organized crime. ~ Pauline Marois

You don't have to be faster than a bullet, you just need to be smarter than the man holding the gun. ~ Pauline Creeden

Griff had never been the fanciful sort, even as a boy. When he was with Pauline, the world was different. She forced him to see things through fresh eyes. Suddenly his library was the eighth wonder of the world, and Corinthian columns merited blasphemy. A ferry across the Thames was an epic journey, and a kiss . . . a kiss was everything. ~ Tessa Dare

Loneliness is the ultimate poverty. ~ Pauline Phillips

When we show love, we make any day a sacred day. - Pauline Sheehan - ~ Gary Chapman