Pauline Kael Quotes - Page 4

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

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

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

Movies, far more than the traditional arts, are tied to big money. Without a few independent critics, there's nothing between the public and the advertisers.

Is there something in druggy subjects that encourages directors to make imitation film noir? Film noir itself becomes an addiction.

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

The slender, swift Bruce Lee was the Fred Astaire of martial arts, and many of the fights that could be merely brutal come across as lightning-fast choreography.

What's disgusting about the Dirty Harry movies is that Eastwood plays this angry tension as righteous indignation.

in show business there's not much point in asking yourself if someone really likes you or if he just thinks you can be useful to him, because there's no difference.

An avidity for more is built into the love of movies. Something else is built in: you have to be open to the idea of getting drunk on movies. (Being able to talk about movies with someone -- to share the giddy high excitement you feel -- is enough for a friendship.

Writers who go to Hollywood still follow the classic pattern: either you get disgusted by 'them' and you leave or you want the money and you become them.

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

Being creative is having something to sell, or knowing how to sell something, or having sold something. It has taken over what we used to mean by being "wised up" knowing the tricks, the shortcuts.

If there's anything to learn from the history of movies, it's that corruption leads to further corruption, not to innocence.

McLuhanism and the media have broken the back of the book business; they've freed people from the shame of not reading. They've rationalized becoming stupid and watching television.

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.