Pauline Kael
Citizen Kane is perhaps the one American talking picture that seems as fresh now as the day it opened. It may seem even fresher.Collection: Movies
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.Collection: Motivational
Movies are so rarely great art that if we cannot appreciate great trash we have very little reason to be interested in them.Collection: Movies
Trash has given us an appetite for art.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Patience
I see little of more importance to the future of our country and of civilization than full recognition of the place of the artist. If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him.
In the arts, the critic is the only independent source of information. The rest is advertising.
A book might be written on the injustice of the just.
A mistake in judgment isn't fatal, but too much anxiety about judgment is.
This movie is a toupee made up to look like honest baldness.
The critic is the only independent source of information. The rest is advertising.
One of the surest signs of the Philistine is his reverence for the superior tastes of those who put him down.
Kevin Costner has feathers in his hair and feathers in his head. The Indians should have called him 'Plays with Camera.'
The first prerogative of an artist in any medium is to make a fool of himself.
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 to see them; we drop in on them because they're so close. If it took some effort to see old movies, we might try to find out which were the good ones, and if people saw only the good ones maybe they would still respect old movies. As it is, people sit and watch movies that audiences walked out on thirty years ago. Like Lot's wife, we are tempted to take another look, attracted not by evil but by something that seems much more shameful -- our own innocence.Collection: Doors
What is getting older if it isn't learning more ways that you're vulnerable?Collection: Getting Older
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.Collection: Perception
Good movies make you care, make you believe in possibilities again. If somewhere in the Hollywood-entertainment world someone has managed to break through with something that speaks to you, then it isn’t all corruption. The movie doesn’t have to be great; it can be stupid and empty and you can still have the joy of a good performance, or the joy in just a good line. An actor’s scowl, a small subversive gesture, a dirty remark that someone tosses off with a mock-innocent face, and the world makes a little bit of sense.Collection: Stupid
If there is any test that can be applied to movies, it's that the good ones never make you feel virtuous.Collection: Tests
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.Collection: Believe
The critical task is necessarily comparative, and younger people do not truly know what is newCollection: People
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.Collection: Directors
I am mystified. I know only one person who voted for Nixon.Collection: Persons
Protagonists are always loners, almost by definition.Collection: Hero
a steady diet of mass culture is a form of deprivation.Collection: Mass Culture
An artist must either give up art or develop.Collection: Art
Great movies are rarely perfect movies.Collection: Perfect
Movies that are consciously life-affirming are to be consciously avoided.Collection: Life Affirming
Sex is the great leveler, taste the great divider.Collection: Sex
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.Collection: Art
Good movies make you care, make you believe in possibilities again.Collection: Movie
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.Collection: Movie
Movies are our cheap and easy expression, the sullen art of displaced persons.Collection: Movie
Vulgarity is not as destructive to an artist as snobbery.Collection: Artist
I felt as if I had attended the funeral of someone I didn't know.Collection: Funeral
When I see those ads with the quote 'You'll have to see this picture twice,' I know it's the kind of picture I don't want to see once.Collection: Movie
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.Collection: Movie
Really, it's not people who don't understand us who drive us nuts—it's when those who shouldn't, do.Collection: Nuts
Television represents what happens to a medium when the artists have no power and the businessmen are in full, unquestioned control.Collection: Artist
Allowing for exceptions, there is still one basic difference between the traditional arts and the mass-media arts: in the traditional arts, the artist grows; in a mass medium, the artist decays profitably.Collection: Art
Kevin Costner has feathers in his hair and feathers in his head. The Indians should have called him 'Plays with Camera.Collection: Hair
Robert Redford ... has turned almost alarmingly blond-he's gone past platinum, he must be into plutonium; his hair is coordinated with his teeth.Collection: Past
There is, in any art, a tendency to turn one's own preferences into a monomaniac theory.Collection: Art
I believe that we respond most and best to work in any art form (and to other experience as well) if we are pluralistic, flexible, relative in our judgments, if we are electic.Collection: Art
Movies are a combination of art and mass medium, but television is so single in its purpose-selling-that it operates without that painful, poignant mixture of aspiration and effort and compromise.Collection: Art
If it took some effort to see old movies, we might try to find out which were the good ones, and if people saw only the good ones maybe they would still respect old movies. As it is, people sit and watch movies that audiences walked out on thirty years ago.Collection: Years
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.Collection: Country
Picasso has a volatile, explosive presence. He seems to take art back to an earlier function, before the centuries of museums and masterpieces; he is the artist as clown, as conjurer, as master funmaker.Collection: Art
Since I have an aversion to movies in which people say grace at the dinner table (not to the practice but to how movies use it to establish the moral strength of a household), the opening night montage of Sunday-night supper in one home after another in Waxahachie, Texas in 1935 - a whole community saying grace made me expect the worst.Collection: Home
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.Collection: Advertising