The first prerogative of an artist in any medium is to make a fool of himself. — Pauline Kael Copy Share Image
Television represents what happens to a medium when the artists have no power and the businessmen are in full, unquestioned control. — Pauline Kael Copy Share Image
Art doesn't come in measured quantities: it's got to be too much or it's not enough. — Pauline Kael Copy Share Image
There is, in any art, a tendency to turn one's own preferences into a monomaniac theory. — Pauline Kael Copy Share Image
The problem with a popular art form is that those who want something more are in a hopeless minority compared with the… — Pauline Kael Copy Share Image
It seems likely that many of the young who don't wait for others to call them artists, but simply announce that they… — Pauline Kael Copy Share Image
Picasso has a volatile, explosive presence. He seems to take art back to an earlier function, before the centuries of museums and… — Pauline Kael Copy Share Image
Allowing for exceptions, there is still one basic difference between the traditional arts and the mass-media arts: in the traditional arts, the… — Pauline Kael Copy Share Image
He [Bernardo Bertolucci] has the kind of talent that breaks one's heart: where can it go, what will happen to it? In… — Pauline Kael Copy Share Image
The worst thing about movie-making is that it's like life: nobody can go back to correct the mistakes. — Pauline Kael Copy Share
Movies have been doing so much of the same thing - in slightly different ways - for so long that few of the possibilities… — Pauline Kael Copy Share
The critic is the only independent source of information. The rest is advertising. — Pauline Kael Copy Share
A good movie can take you out of your dull funk and the hopelessness that so often goes with slipping into a theatre; a… — Pauline Kael Copy Share
The movies have been so rank the last couple of years that when I see people lining up to buy tickets I sometimes think… — Pauline Kael Copy Share
Movies are so rarely great art that if we cannot appreciate great trash we have very little reason to be interested in them. — Pauline Kael Copy Share
If you use Hollywood as the test tissue for mankind, what could the prognosis be? — Pauline Kael Copy Share
Where there is a will, there is a way. If there is a chance in a million that you can do something, anything, to… — Pauline Kael Copy Share
What this generation was bred to at television's knees was not wisdom, but cynicism. — Pauline Kael Copy Share
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… — Pauline Kael Copy Share
if you think it so easy to be a critic, so difficult to be a poet or a painter or film experimenter, may I… — Pauline Kael Copy Share
Writers who go to Hollywood still follow the classic pattern: either you get disgusted by 'them' and you leave or you want the money… — Pauline Kael Copy Share
Robert Redford ... has turned almost alarmingly blond-he's gone past platinum, he must be into plutonium; his hair is coordinated with his teeth. — Pauline Kael Copy Share