Pauline Kael

Her only flair is in her nostrils.

— Pauline Kael

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

— Pauline Kael

a steady diet of mass culture is a form of deprivation.

— Pauline Kael

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

— Pauline Kael

This movie is a toupee made up to look like honest baldness.

— Pauline Kael

Great movies are rarely perfect movies.

— Pauline Kael

I am mystified. I know only one person who voted for Nixon.

— Pauline Kael

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

— 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

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

— Pauline Kael

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

— Pauline Kael

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

— Pauline Kael

Imagining [The Wizard of Oz] without Judy Garland is a bit like dancing on wet cement: you can do it, but why…

— Pauline Kael

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

— Pauline Kael

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

— Pauline Kael

Movies are a combination of art and mass medium, but television is so single in its purpose-selling-that it operates without that painful,…

— Pauline Kael

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

— Pauline Kael

When a picture can't make it on its own, the producers pull in a 'controversial' message - the way a couple whose…

— Pauline Kael

in show business there's not much point in asking yourself if someone really likes you or if he just thinks you can…

— Pauline Kael

I believe that we respond most and best to work in any art form (and to other experience as well) if we…

— Pauline Kael

The problem with a popular art form is that those who want something more are in a hopeless minority compared with the…

— Pauline Kael

If I never saw another fistfight or car chase or Doberman attack, I wouldn't have any feeling of loss. And that goes…

— Pauline Kael

We read critics for the perceptions, for what they tell us that we didn't fully grasp when we saw the work. The…

— Pauline Kael

Before seeing Truffaut 's Small Change, I was afraid it was going to be one of those simple, natural films about childhood…

— Pauline Kael

We will never know the extent of the damage movies are doing to us, but movie art, it appears, thrives on moral…

— Pauline Kael

Since I have an aversion to movies in which people say grace at the dinner table (not to the practice but to…

— Pauline Kael

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

In San Francisco, vulgarity, "bad taste," ostentation are regarded as a kind of alien blight, an invasion or encroachment from outside. In…

— Pauline Kael

Good movies make you care, make you believe in possibilities again. If somewhere in the Hollywood-entertainment world someone has managed to break…

— Pauline Kael

There seems to be an assumption that if you're offended by movie brutality, you are somehow playing into the hands of the…

— Pauline Kael

A good movie can take you out of your dull funk and the hopelessness that so often goes with slipping into a…

— Pauline Kael

“A good movie can take you out of your dull funk and the hopelessness that so often goes with slipping into a…

— Pauline Kael

Watching old movies is like spending an evening with those people next door. They bore us, and we wouldn't go out of…

— Pauline Kael

Sex is the great leveler, taste the great divider.

— Pauline Kael

Vulgarity is not as destructive to an artist as snobbery.

— Pauline Kael

Trash has given us an appetite for art.

— Pauline Kael

I can't believe Nixon won. I don't know anyone who voted for him.

— Pauline Kael

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

— Pauline Kael

Protagonists are always loners, almost by definition.

— Pauline Kael