Pauline Kael Quotes

I would say most comedians have a very cynical worldview of the way the world can work. It's almost like if you didn't, you couldn't be a comedian.

I would think a sense of the absurd is more important for a political cartoonist, because that could define things like a sense of hypocrisy or a sense of the things one has to be skeptical about.

My brother believed in all sorts of mythical creatures: pixies, dragons, werewolves, honest men.

Nothing ever happened on this globe, for good, at which some people did not have their fill of laughter in the onset; and knowing that such as these would be blind anyway, he thought it quite as well that they should wrinkle up their eyes in grins, as have a malady in the less attractive forms.

I would die happy if I knew that on my tombstone could be written these words, "This man was an absolute fool. None of the disastrous things that he reluctantly predicted ever came to pass!"

Uh, my lord, I am not actually food. You do realize this, yes?

If you want to get rid of counterfeit money, put it in the collection plate at church.

I have been called a curmudgeon, which my obsolescent dictionary defines as a "surly, illmannered, badtempered fellow." ... Nowadays, curmudgeon is likely to refer to anyone who hates hypocrisy, cant, sham, dogmatic ideologies, the pretenses and evasions of euphemism, and has the nerve to point out unpleasant facts and takes the trouble to impale these sins on the skewer of humor and roast them over the fires of empiric fact, common sense, and native intelligence. In this nation of bleating sheep and braying jackasses, it then becomes an honor to be labeled curmudgeon.

I lose confidence in other people, all kinds of institutions.

[On hearing that President Coolidge was dead:] How can you tell?

It's not that I don't trust you, Dunstable, it's simply that I don't trust you.

Daisy looked up at him with the kind of expression that Jesus might have given someone who had just explained that he was probably allergic to bread and fishes, so could He possibly do him a quick chicken salad.

I was traveling down the road with a buddy and there's a guy driving around in a jeep with a dead deer strapped to the hood. My buddy says to me you think he's been hunting? Nope, They're probably giving them away with the purchase of every jeep. Here's your sign!

There must be more malice than love in the hearts of all wits.

Steven Spielberg is going to release a biopic about Abraham Lincoln next year. Right, that's a good way to honor Lincoln – by sending people to the theater.

Nobody has ever, ever, in the history of politics received the kind of negative advertising that I have. Record, record. By the way mostly false, I wouldn't say 100 percent but about 90 percent. Mostly false, vicious, horrible.

I've taken up the Bible again, somewhat in the spirit of W.C. Fields - looking for loopholes.

Don't wake me for the end of the world unless it has very good special effects.

Ocean's 13 is all about cool people having a good time, and who doesn't want to see that? Well you, apparantly, 'cause you're watching me.

I have the kind of show that reminds you of your problems, and then I talk about other problems you didn't even know you had until tonight.

I regard everything with irony, including the face I see in the mirror when I wake up in the morning.

You ought to be ironical the minute you get out of bed. You ought to wake up with your mouth full of pity.

Irony: Don't let yourself be controlled by it, especially during uncreative moments.

Cynicism is the other thing that goes with sentimentality.