Pauline Kael Quotes (22 Quotes)


    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.

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

    says Lopez. ''They're right near where I live and they have such a great film program over there it seemed a perfect place for it.

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

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




    About 20 years ago, upon seeing him in Street Smart, ... Is Morgan Freeman America's best actor

    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 eclectic.

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

    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.

    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.

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

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

    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.

    In this country we encourage creativity among the mediocre, but real bursting creativity appalls us. We put it down as undisciplined, as somehow too much.

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

    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

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

    Just about the best Hollywood musical of all time.

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


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