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

There is, in any art, a tendency to turn one's own preferences into a monomaniac theory.

— 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

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

— Pauline Kael

Movies that are consciously life-affirming are to be consciously avoided.

— Pauline Kael

The romance of movies is not just in those stories and those people on the screen but in the adolescent dream of…

— Pauline Kael

The slender, swift Bruce Lee was the Fred Astaire of martial arts, and many of the fights that could be merely brutal…

— Pauline Kael

Art doesn't come in measured quantities: it's got to be too much or it's not enough.

— Pauline Kael

Moviegoers like to believe that those they have made stars are great actors. People used to say that Gary Cooper was a…

— Pauline Kael

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

— Pauline Kael

The first prerogative of an artist in any medium is to make a fool of himself.

— 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

For perhaps most Americans, TV is an apppliance, not to be used selectively but to be turned on - there's always something…

— Pauline Kael

The critical task is necessarily comparative, and younger people do not truly know what is new

— Pauline Kael

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

— Pauline Kael

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

— Pauline Kael

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

— Pauline Kael

An avidity for more is built into the love of movies. Something else is built in: you have to be open to…

— Pauline Kael

There is something spurious about the very term 'a movie made for TV,' because what you make for TV is a TV…

— Pauline Kael

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

— 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

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

tasteful and colossal are - in movies, at least - basically antipathetic.

— 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

Vulgarity is not as destructive to an artist as snobbery.

— Pauline Kael