Top 70 Pauline Kael Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Where there is a will, there is a way. If there is a chance in a million that you can do something, anything, to keep what you want from ending, do it. Pry the door open or, if need be, wedge your foot in that door and keep it open.”

— Pauline Kael

Featured in: Never Give Up Quotes, Willpower Quotes, Obstacles Quotes

2. “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.”

— Pauline Kael

3. “Her only flair is in her nostrils.”

— Pauline Kael

4. “In the arts, the critic is the only independent source of information. The rest is advertising.”

— Pauline Kael

5. “A mistake in judgment isn’t fatal, but too much anxiety about judgment is.”

— Pauline Kael

6. “A good movie can take you out of your dull funk and the hopelessness that so often goes with slipping into a theatre; a good movie can make you feel alive again, in contact, not just lost in another city. Good movies make you care, make you believe in possibilities again.”

— Pauline Kael

7. “Great movies are rarely perfect movies.”

— Pauline Kael

8. “All our advertising is propaganda, of course, but it has become so much a part of our life, is so pervasive, that we just don’t know what it is propaganda for.”

— Pauline Kael

9. “I’m frequently asked why I don’t write my memoirs. I think I have.”

— Pauline Kael

10. “Irresponsibility is part of the pleasure of all art; it is the part the schools cannot recognize.”

— Pauline Kael

11. “Good movies make you care, make you believe in possibilities again.”

— Pauline Kael

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

— Pauline Kael

13. “Trash has given us an appetite for art.”

— Pauline Kael

14. “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.”

— Pauline Kael

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

— Pauline Kael

16. “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

17. “What’s disgusting about the Dirty Harry movies is that Eastwood plays this angry tension as righteous indignation.”

— Pauline Kael

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

— Pauline Kael

19. “The slender, swift Bruce Lee was the Fred Astaire of martial arts, and many of the fights that could be merely brutal come across as lightning-fast choreography.”

— Pauline Kael

20. “Movies that are consciously life-affirming are to be consciously avoided...”

— Pauline Kael

21. “Protagonists are always loners, almost by definition.”

— Pauline Kael

22. “Movies are our cheap and easy expression, the sullen art of displaced persons.”

— Pauline Kael

23. “If there is any test that can be applied to movies, it’s that the good ones never make you feel virtuous.”

— Pauline Kael

24. “When we championed trash culture we had no idea it would become the only culture.”

— Pauline Kael

25. “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.”

— Pauline Kael

26. “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.”

— Pauline Kael

27. “We may be reaching the end of the era in which individual movies meant something to people. In the new era, movies may just mean a barrage of images.”

— Pauline Kael

28. “It seems likely that many of the young who don’t wait for others to call them artists, but simply announce that they are, don’t have the patience to make art.”

— Pauline Kael

29. “At the movies, we are gradually being conditioned to accept violence as a sensual pleasure. The directors used to say they were showing us its real face and how ugly it was in order to sensitize us to its horrors. You don’t have to be very keen to see that they are now in fact desensitizing us.”

— Pauline Kael

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

— Pauline Kael

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

— Pauline Kael

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

— Pauline Kael

33. “Moviegoers like to believe that those they have made stars are great actors. People used to say that Gary Cooper was a fine actor probably because when they looked in his face they were ready to give him their power of attorney.”

— Pauline Kael

34. “When a picture can’t make it on its own, the producers pull in a ‘controversial’ message – the way a couple whose marriage is falling apart decide to have a baby.”

— Pauline Kael

35. “What is getting older if it isn’t learning more ways that you’re vulnerable?”

— Pauline Kael

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

— Pauline Kael

37. “In a foreign country people don’t expect you to be just like them, but in Los Angeles, which is infiltrating the world, they don’t consider that you might be different because they don’t recognize any values except their own. And soon there may not be any others.”

— Pauline Kael

38. “I felt as if I had attended the funeral of someone I didn’t know.”

— Pauline Kael

39. “Citizen Kane is perhaps the one American talking picture that seems as fresh now as the day it opened. It may seem even fresher.”

— Pauline Kael

40. “It’s sometimes discouraging to see all of a director’s movies, because there’s so much repetition. The auteurists took this to be a sign of a director’s artistry, that you could recognize his movies. But it can also be a sign that he’s a hack.”

— Pauline Kael

41. “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.”

— Pauline Kael

42. “The problem with a popular art form is that those who want something more are in a hopeless minority compared with the millions who are always seeing it for the first time, or for the reassurance and gratification of seeing the conventions fulfilled again.”

— Pauline Kael

43. “Movies, far more than the traditional arts, are tied to big money. Without a few independent critics, there’s nothing between the public and the advertisers.”

— Pauline Kael

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

— Pauline Kael

45. “If I never saw another fistfight or car chase or Doberman attack, I wouldn’t have any feeling of loss. And that goes for Rottweilers, too.”

— Pauline Kael

46. “Vulgarity is not as destructive to an artist as snobbery.”

— Pauline Kael

47. “If you’re afraid of movies that excite your senses, you’re afraid of movies.”

— Pauline Kael

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

— Pauline Kael

49. “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

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

— Pauline Kael