140 Quotes by Pauline Kael

The words “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang” which I saw on an Italian movie poster, are perhaps the briefest statement imaginable of the basic appeal of movies.

Really, it’s not people who don’t understand us who drive us nuts – it’s when those who shouldn’t, do.

For some strange reason we don’t go to charming, light movies anymore. People expect a movie to be heavy and turgid, like “American Beauty.” We’ve become a heavy-handed society.

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.

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.

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

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

We read critics for the perceptions, for what they tell us that we didn’t fully grasp when we saw the work. The judgments we can usually make for ourselves.

Movies have been doing so much of the same thing – in slightly different ways – for so long that few of the possibilities of this great hybrid art have yet been explored.