Pauline Kael Quotations

Being creative is having something to sell, or knowing how to sell something, or having sold something. It has taken over what we used to mean by being "wised up" knowing the tricks, the shortcuts.

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

Vulgarity is not as destructive to an artist as snobbery.

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

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

Sex is the great leveler, taste the great divider.

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

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.

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.

Moviemaking is so male-dominated now that they think they’re being pro-feminine when they have women punching each other out.