Pauline Kael Short Quotes

25 Sourced Quotes

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Sex is the great leveler, taste the great divider.

Pauline Kael
You don't have to lay an egg to know if it tastes good.

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

Pauline Kael
To lambaste a Ross Hunter production is like flogging a sponge.

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

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

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

Pauline Kael
Infallible taste is inconceivable; what could it be measured against?

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

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

Pauline Kael
If you can't make fun of bad movies on serious subjects, what's the point?

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

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

Pauline Kael
The pimp who peddles good clean stuff is nevertheless engaged in prostitution.

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

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

Pauline Kael
Kicked in the ribs, the press says "art" when "ouch" would be more appropriate.

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

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

Pauline Kael
The action genre has always had a fascist potential, and it surfaces in this movie.

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

Pauline Kael
There is, in any art, a tendency to turn one's own preferences into a monomaniac theory.

Pauline Kael
Rain Man is Dustin Hoffman humping one note on a piano for two hours and eleven minutes.

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

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

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

Pauline Kael
The Way We Were is a fluke — a torpedoed ship full of gaping holes which comes snugly into port.

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
Television as we have it isn't an art form — it's a piece of furniture that is good for a few things.

Pauline Kael