Aging & Wisdom Quote by Pauline Kael

Kael is skewering a particular kind of cultural impatience: the leap from self-declaration to self-importance without the long, unglamorous middle where craft is actually built. The line lands because it treats “artist” not as an identity you can claim like a username, but as a status earned through time, friction, and other people’s stubborn reluctance to be impressed.

Her syntax does quiet rhetorical work. “It seems likely” is a critic’s scalpel, not a shrug: she’s signaling judgment while keeping the door open to exceptions, which makes the jab feel fair rather than merely cranky. The real bite is in the contrast between “don’t wait” and “don’t have the patience.” Waiting, in her framing, isn’t passive. It’s apprenticeship, revision, failure, the humiliating stretches where you keep going without applause. When someone “simply announce[s] that they are,” Kael implies, they’ve skipped the ordeal that art demands and replaced it with branding.

The subtext is also about gatekeeping, but not the cartoon version. Kael isn’t arguing for aristocratic permission slips; she’s pointing to how communities confer meaning. Art is a social transaction: you make the thing, and then you live with the world’s response long enough for it to matter. In Kael’s era, that response ran through editors, critics, venues, and audiences; today it runs through platforms and follower counts, which makes her warning feel eerily current. Self-definition can be liberating, but Kael reminds us how easily it turns into an alibi for not doing the work.