Pauline Kael Quotes

Nobody seems to know yet how television is going to affect the radio, movies, love, housekeeping or the church, but it has definitely revived vaudeville.

I think television has had a vast, unbelievable impact on us.

I think TV shows have usurped films!

I still can't get over the idea that respectable adults now go to see superhero movies and that such films get reviewed in the 'New Yorker.' Clearly, I am seriously out of step with the times.

Whatever happened to books? Suddenly everybody's talking about these 100-hour movies called 'Breaking Bad'. People are talking about TV the same way they used to talk about novels back in the 1980s. I like to think I hang out with some pretty smart people, but all they talk about is 'Breaking Bad.'

Books were king, but now movies are king, and books are sort of ignored. So now there's no sense of a welcoming community where you live.

I am trying change trends in movies, just as I am trying to change trends in politics.

The kind of films that are made depends on the kind of films that are becoming hits. That's why I always say you should be very careful about which film you decide to watch.

The arrival of 'Star Wars' signalled the full absorption of the former counterculture into a new mainstream.

I don't really think about film or television or going directly to the internet. I just think about doing something that people are going to get excited about.

There are a lot of movies I feel good about. It was a great experience that I was lucky enough to be there in it. That's the way I feel.

Television is not hurting. Television is in fantastic shape. It's just a golden age for other people.

Popular literature and culture used to reflect people's aspirations, pain, and passion. All those particular things are no longer available to us.

Ultimately the social change has to come from the people who make the movies, so the people who make the movies have to look at the landscape and say to themselves, "Well, you know, these things are changing, and I'm okay with their having changed, and I think it's okay to start reflecting those changes through the movies we make."

You've got to remember that films don't lead the way. People think that films are trying to lead society. Mostly, they're reflecting the moods and thoughts that are going on in the country or around the world.

There's something about the evolution of television where it evolved from to the things that we're now watching and loving. It evolved from film writers, film actors, and I think gradually people are easing themselves into the amount of time they have.

Things are shifting; man is evolving in many different ways. The Internet has created a portal for people to connect with each other in a way they never could have before. When it comes to African-American or black films, it's different because there is a model that you can actually look at, an equation that shows that these films earn money.

People used to throw rocks at me for my clothes, now they wanna know where I buy them.

There was great political uncertainty in South Asia at the time of the Buddha. The older small tribal societies were cracking up and gave way to bigger states. There was much more trade and travel going on than before. To people in the cities the experience of living in a small place where you knew everyone and governed your affairs by consensual democracy had been lost.

In the East, as in the West, newspapers are fast becoming people's Bible, Koran, Zend-Avesta and Gita all rolled into one.

People will tell me, "Oh, my kid watches your show on their iPad, over and over again until they memorize." And I'm like, "Wow, I was that kid watching other shows. That's the coolest!"

When I first started doing comedy, there was no such thing as a room that had black people and white people in it. That didn't exist.

But if it ever occurs to people to value the honor of the mind equally with the honor of the body, we shall get a social revolution of a quite unparalleled sort — and very different from the kind that is being made at the moment.

We live in a very special time right now. At no other time in history has there been such mass disillusionment in terms of reliance on governing functions. Most people don’t want to come to terms with that. It’s been proven over and over again that the emperor isn’t wearing any clothes, but most people don’t like to look at naked emperors. In the process of turning around to avert their eyes, they saw the discotheques and a few other things and latched onto them.

The 'medium' is unaware of its attractiveness, that's all. Everyone loves comics. I've proven this to my own satisfaction by handing them out to acountants, insurance brokers, hairdressers, mothers of children, black belts, pop stars, taxi drivers, painters, lesbians, doctors etc. etc. The X-Files, Buffy, the Matrix, X-Men - mainstream culture is not what it once was when science fiction and comics fans huddled in cellars like Gnostic Christians dodging the Romans. We should come up into the light soon before we suffocate.