Pauline Kael quotes

" Her only flair is in her nostrils. " # Education

" Irresponsibility is part of the pleasure of all art; it is the part the schools cannot recognize. " # Arts and Artists # Politics # Education

" 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. " # Television # Marriage # Love

" 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. This appeal is what attracts us, and ultimately what makes us despair when we begin to understand how seldom movies are more than this. " # Cinema # Kisses and Kissing # Imagination

" In the arts, the critic is the only independent source of information. The rest is advertising. " # Critics and Criticism # Information # Advertising

" One of the surest signs of the Philistine is his reverence for the superior tastes of those who put him down. " # Culture # Taste # Friends and Friendship

" The first prerogative of an artist in any medium is to make a fool of himself. " # Arts and Artists # Love # Fools and Foolishness

" I regard criticism as an art, and if in this country and in this age it is practiced with honesty, it is no more remunerative than the work of an avant-garde film artist. My dear anonymous letter writers, if you think it is 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. " # Modern and Modernism # Arts and Artists # Writers and Writing

" Earlier generations went to see what was forbidden in life and developed a real excitement about the movies. Today’s rating system keeps kids out of the good ones. I wouldn’t want them to see movies like Natural Born Killers, but my tendency is you’re better off seeing things than not. That glazed indifference kids develop can be worse than over-excitement. " # War # Love # Life and Living

" Moviemaking is so male-dominated now that they think they’re being pro-feminine when they have women punching each other out. " # Acting and Actors # Women # Men