Quotes by Pauline Kael

“A good movie can take you out of your dull funk and the hopelessness that so often goes with slipping into a theatre; a good movie can make you feel alive again, in contact, not just lost in anothe...”

“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 a...”

“An artist must either give up art or develop.”

“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.”

“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 ...”

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

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

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

“The worst thing about movie-making is that it's like life: nobody can go back to correct the mistakes.”

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

“Object to the Hollywood film and you’re an intellectual snob, object to the avant-garde films and you’re a Philistine. But, while in Hollywood, one must often be a snob; in avant-garde circles one ...”

“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 w...”

“Regrettably, one of the surest signs of the Philistine is his reverence for the superior tastes of those who put him down.”

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

“October 14, 1972: that date should become a landmark in movie history comparable to May 29, 1913 — the night Le Sacre du Printemps was first performed — in music history. There was no riot, and no ...”

“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.”

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

“A woman who taught at Berkeley dropped in on me once and saw a book burning in the fireplace. She pointed at it in terror, and I explained that it was a crummy ghostwritten life of a movie star and...”

“Before seeing Truffaut's Small Change, I was afraid it was going to be one of those simple, natural films about childhood which I generally try to avoid — I'm just not good enough to go to them. Bu...”

“I loved writing about things when I was excited about them. It's not fun writing about bad movies. I used to think it was bad for my skin. It's painful writing about the bad things in an art form, ...”