Pauline Kael Quotes

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

Television represents what happens to a medium when the artists have no power and the businessmen are in full, unquestioned control.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Vulgarity is not as destructive to an artist as snobbery.

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.

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

I’m frequently asked why I don’t write my memoirs. I think I have.

Great movies are rarely perfect movies.

if you think it so easy to be a critic, so difficult to be a poet or a painter or film experimenter, may I suggest you try both? You may discover why there are so few critics, so many poets.

...When the bespangled Miss Charisse wraps her phenomenal legs around [Fred] Astaire, she can be forgiven everything—even the fact that she reads her lines as if she learned them phonetically.