Pauline Kael Quotes

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

Her only flair is in her nostrils.

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

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

Vulgarity is not as destructive to an artist as snobbery.

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

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.

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.

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

Great movies are rarely perfect movies.

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