- Paul Schrader: We're not talking about film criticism, we're talking about Pauline Kael, and - in the end of the game - what Kael promoted wasn't film. It was her.
- Paul Schrader: She was famous for lying in wait on her reviews. She never really wanted to be the first one out for something. She'd sit back and, you know, figure out which way the reviews are gonna go and she'd find a weakness, an angle, and go right in at it.
- Pauline Kael: The process is simply of thinking, really. I mean, writing is simply, you know, putting down what you think. And to be paid for thinking and to know that you're doing something that may even have some value that, you know, some other people might enjoy that process and share it with you, I mean, that's *marvelous* way to live. I mean, I can't think of any better way to live.
- Lili Anolik: She turned a movie review, which is this kind of flimsy vehicle, its a thumbs up or thumbs down endeavor, into this expressive art form.
- Daryl Chin: After going to see "Limelight," she went to a cafe with the people she had gone with. And they were arguing about it and she was very forceful about how she didn't like it. One of the people who was editing the City Lights bookstore's "Journal" came over to her and said "Well, why don't you write this for us," and she did. And that was her first review.
- Pauline Kael: I think its very difficult for a woman particularly to go out with a man that she disagrees with sharply in matters of taste; because it really does offend all his macho sense, and, particularly, say 20 or 30 years ago, if he was buying the tickets and if he was paying date. Even if he liked you to be bright and sharp and funny, he didn't like any basic disagreements. Now, I broke that over "West Side Story."
- Greil Marcus: It would be hard to be as engaged with the world as Pauline was, in terms of her energy, in terms of her intellectual curiosity, in terms of her capacity for outrage and love.
- Gina James: [Pauline's daughter] My mother a great love of 30s movies, particularly the, you know, the tough dames. I think she liked to emulate that a little bit, suggest that she had that in herself.
- David Edelstein: Pauline would write about something and you would not only love reading it; but, then you would wanted to see what she wrote about so that you could argue with her or you could relive it with her or you could see it through her eyes.
- Pauline Kael: In the arts, women are accepted. They've always been accepted in the theater. But criticism, since it involves analytic intelligence and rationale use of one's intellect, that hits exactly where men have always wanted to believe that women were less gifted. Its one thing to show sensitivity and talent; I mean, men like that in women. But, it is very, very difficult for men to accept the idea that women can argue reasonably.
- Gina James: Growing up with a critic, making judgments, being judgmental, she couldn't *not* be critical. She was always criticizing.
- Lili Anolik: Movies are the impure art. I think she called them the great bastard cross-fertilized super art.
- Greil Marcus: Pauline is quarreling, fighting with, condemning, attacking and she loved to set up New York critics as straw men and then knock them down.
- Greil Marcus: [on Kael's review of "Bonnie and Clyde"] This is in the middle of the Vietnam War where people are becoming inured to death, to carnage, to blood... I will never forget the last line of that piece, "By making us care about these outlaw lovers, this movie has put the sting back into death." Wham. The movie ends in complete silence and the theater is left in complete silence. Everything you've been watching on the news every night from Vietnam has suddenly been made *unreal* by this movie. That's the great inversion that happens in art. That happens and the criticism can help make happen.
- Greil Marcus: Even if you've seen the movie you haven't seen the movie. You're seeing it for the first time as you're reading the review.
- Paul Schrader: Pauline was obviously a west coast girl. And she saw herself as that and that was one of the tools she used to maintain her feistiness. Not part of their club.
- Gina James: My mother had a deep love and responsiveness to art, to music, to theater. When I was growing up she had a lot of jazz and blues. She liked gospel music and listening to Mahalia Jackson and the counter-tenor Russell Oberlin singing Handel. She was a great lover of many kinds and forms of beauty.
- Lili Anolik: She was writing this review and said she would then speak it on the radio. You know, performing her reviews. And, I think freed something up in her. You know, she was able to cut loose and let it rip.
- Greil Marcus: She wrote as someone who, in order to see a movie, had to go to a movie theater and pay to buy a ticket and go in and find a seat and sit down. When she writes about a movie, she also writes about the audience around her. She writes as part of an audience and she's listening to the catcalls and the wisecracks, the sound of boredom, or the sound of excitement, engagement. And all that goes into her writing.
- Pauline Kael: Horror films have reached this kind of rut. I don't enjoy them any more. Partly, that's because eight years of living in New York makes you so fearful and nervous anyway, that horror films just really scare the heck out of me. I can't stand them any more! I mean, I don't want anything to add to the nightmare atmosphere of New York were you're afraid you're not going to make it home safely, anyway. Particularly a middle-aged, dumpy, little woman whose just perfect for somebody to knock over.
- Pauline Kael: Without critics you have nothing but advertisers. So, it's the job of the critic, in terms of a social function, to try to alert people and interest them in anything that's really new or innovative, that spells the future of an art form. Because, a few critics doing that, the advertisers will keep everything stagnant. Because, if they can sell anything, if there are no dissenting voices, movies will not advance any way.
- Pauline Kael: I think some people make the mistake of wanting to drop on everything and say, "Not as good as Eisenstein." When the important thing is to see how movies are used by people and what needs they satisfy. Some of the greatest pleasures I've had have been from pretty terrible pictures.
- Molly Haskell: No male critic had as much testosterone as Pauline. So this is what, I think, was sort of always shocking and kind of sexy about her writing that nobody else could get away with writing that way. I was in awe of it.
- George Malko: She would fight tooth and nail not to weaken or, as she once said, not to chop the balls off a piece.
- Michael Sragow: My attitude from the beginning was, well, I'd rather be called a Paulette than a, you know, Andrew Sarrisite.
- John Boorman: She conducted a debate between filmmakers and herself. We were all under surveillance and she kept us on our toes.
- Robert Towne: She created a tremendous amount of attention both to herself and to "Bonnie and Clyde" with her review - which changed the face of reviewing. The first reviews of the movie were so bad, everywhere, that you just thought, "Well, that's it for this movie"... And then Pauline reviewed it in such a spectacular way that it caused a counter reaction.
- David O. Russell: I think all art and cinema are subjective. And I think she was a master of contradiction. And the films that she spoke about were filled with contradictions. And often her taste was filled with contradiction.
- Camille Paglia: Just a masterpiece of satire is "The Come-Dressed-As-the-Sick-Soul-of-Europe Parties." This, what Kael was attacking, were the films I adored. Oh, these foreign films where the people migrated from one bad party to another. Pauline Kael, in her attack on those films, captures exactly what it was I loved about the films.
- Alec Baldwin: Critics are forced to mute their criticisms of the goose that lays the golden egg in the movie business. And there is very few critics who have the guts and have the conviction and have the ethic to go out there and write an honest review of a bad movie. Because the business is has sent you a signal: just don't say anything bad.
- Tom Pollock: "Trash, Art, and the Movies" was highly influential to me. I knew the difference between what was art and what was trash. *But*, her distinction between what is good trash and bad trash, populace movies that are done really well, but do not aspire necessarily to be art, are still to be cherished and tried for. Its what the business of the studio is. And you don't have to do it by pandering to the lowest common denominator. You can do it well, without necessarily making art.
- Quentin Tarantino: One review Pauline Kael wrote that ended up meaning something to me in a big way, was for "Band of Outsiders." She said it was as if a bunch of movie-mad young French boys had taken a banal American crime novel and translated the poetry that they had read between the line. It was like - that is my aesthetic. Right there. That is - that's what I hope I can do.