Art Quote by 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 this country we encourage 'creativity' among the mediocre, but real bursting creativity appalls us. We put it down as undisciplined, as somehow 'too much.' Well, Before the Revolution is too much and that is what is great about it. Art doesn't come in measured quantities: it's got to be too much or it's not enough.”

Pauline Kael

★ ★ ★ ★ ★ 3.4 out of 5 (10 ratings)

Art Break Bursting Country Creativity Enough Happens Heart Kind Mediocre Quantity Real Revolution Talent Too much Undisciplined Wells

More by Pauline Kael

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

Pauline Kael

Image

Movies have been doing so much of the same thing - in slightly different ways - for so long that few of the possibilities…

Pauline Kael

Image

The critic is the only independent source of information. The rest is advertising.

Pauline Kael

Image

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

Image

The movies have been so rank the last couple of years that when I see people lining up to buy tickets I sometimes think that the movies aren't drawing an audience - they're inheriting an audience. People just want to go to a movie. They're stung repeatedly, yet their desire for a good movie - for any movie - is…

Pauline Kael

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

Image

If you use Hollywood as the test tissue for mankind, what could the prognosis be?

Pauline Kael

Image

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

Image

What this generation was bred to at television's knees was not wisdom, but cynicism.

Pauline Kael

Image

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

Image

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

Pauline Kael

Image

Protagonists are always loners, almost by definition.

Pauline Kael

Image

Explore all 96 Pauline Kael quotes

More Art quotes

True works of art contain their own theory and give us the measurement according to which we should judge them.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Image

Before Noah, men having only water to drink, could not find the truth. Accordingly...they became abominably wicked, and they were justly exterminated by the water they loved to drink. This good man, Noah, having seen that all his contemporaries had perished by this unpleasant drink, took a dislike to it; and God, to relieve his dryness, created the vine and…

Benjamin Franklin

“Hear the sum of the whole matter in the compass of one brief word — every art possessed by man comes from Prometheus.”

Aeschylus

Image

I think most artists feel like they're outside society - no matter how many accolades they receive, or how much money is in your…

Aaron Rose

Image

The capacity to be puzzled is the premise of all creation, be it in art or in science.

Erich Fromm

Image

That's the great secret of creativity. You treat ideas like cats: you make them follow you.

Ray Bradbury

Image

“So, really," continued Jacob as if this were perfectly normal to expound on art in these circumstances, "when you think about it, the artists who make people stop and think, who push the form, who make you uncomfortable, who are laughable, well, they're the ones who get remembered." Idly, Jacob dug a hole in the snow with his shovel and…

Justina Chen Headley