Renata Adler Quotes

Quotes about:

• Idle people are often bored and bored people, unless they sleep a lot, are cruel. It is not accident that boredom and cruelty are great preoccupations in our time.

  Renata Adler

  Sleep, Blessing, Boredom

  51 Copy quote

• That 'writers write' is meant to be self-evident. People like to say it. I find it is hardly ever true. Writers drink. Writers rant. Writers phone. Writers sleep. I have met very few writers who write at all.

  Renata Adler

  Writing, Sleep, Phones

  Renata Adler (2013). “Speedboat”, p.30, New York Review of Books

  19 Copy quote

• I think when you are truly stuck, when you have stood still in the same spot for too long, you throw a grenade in exactly the spot you were standing in, and jump, and pray. It is the momentum of last resort.

  Renata Adler

  Life, Thinking, Long

  Renata Adler (2013). “Speedboat”, p.29, New York Review of Books

  11 Copy quote

• Fear . . . is forward. No one is afraid of yesterday.

  Renata Adler

  Fear, Yesterday

  Renata Adler (2013). “Pitch Dark”, p.149, New York Review of Books

  9 Copy quote

• The writer has a grudge against society, which he documents with accounts of unsatisfying sex, unrealized ambition, unmitigated loneliness, and a sense of local and global distress.

  Renata Adler

  Sex, Loneliness, Ambition

  Renata Adler (1970). “Toward a radical middle: fourteen pieces of reporting and criticism”

  9 Copy quote

• My dislike has no consequences. It accrues only in my mind—like preserves on a shelf or guns zeroing in, and never firing.

  Renata Adler

  Gun, Mind, Shelves

  8 Copy quote

• No one ever confides a secret to one person only. No one destroys all copies of a document.

  Renata Adler

  Secret, Copies, Persons

  Renata Adler (2013). “Pitch Dark”, p.35, New York Review of Books

  8 Copy quote

• Bored people, unless they sleep a lot, are cruel.

  Renata Adler

  Book, Reading, Sleep

  14 Copy quote

• The whole magic of a plot requires that somebody be impeded from getting something over with.

  Renata Adler

  Magic, Plot, Whole

  8 Copy quote

• Self-pity” is just sadness, I think, in the pejorative.

  Renata Adler

  Sadness, Thinking, Self

  Renata Adler (2013). “Speedboat”, p.53, New York Review of Books

  4 Copy quote

• My capacity for having a good time exists. It surfaces, however, on odd occasions.

  Renata Adler

  Good Times, Odd, Capacity

  Renata Adler (2013). “Speedboat”, p.15, New York Review of Books

  8 Copy quote

• There follows a little obscenity here, a dash of philosophy there, considerable whining overall, and a modern satirical novel is born.

  Renata Adler

  Philosophy, Littles, Cocktail Parties

  9 Copy quote

• The motion picture is like journalism in that, more than any of the other arts, it confers celebrity. Not just on people - on acts, and objects, and places, and ways of life. The camera brings a kind of stardom to them all. I therefore doubt that film can ever argue effectively against its own material: that a genuine antiwar film, say, can be made on the basis of even the ugliest battle scenes ... No matter what filmmakers intend, film always argues yes.

  Renata Adler

  Movie, Art, People

  4 Copy quote

• Most movies are not very good. Most people know it and like to see them anyway.

  Renata Adler

  Movie, People, Very Good

  Renata Adler (1969). “A year in the dark: journal of a film critic, 1968-69”

  4 Copy quote

• I think maybe writers come from different planets. I mean, not in any sense as extravagant as Baryshnikov. But there are some writers who understand each other this way and others who understand each other that way. Then there's this great herd, the "herd of independent minds."

  Renata Adler

  Mean, Independent, Thinking

  Interview with Alice Gregory, www.believermag.com. December 12, 2012.

  4 Copy quote

• The radical intelligence in the moderate position is the only place where the center holds. Or so it seems.

  Renata Adler

  Radical, Position, Seems

  Renata Adler (2013). “Speedboat”, p.41, New York Review of Books

  4 Copy quote

• It is always self-defeating to pretend to the style of a generation younger than your own; it simply erases your own experience in history.

  Renata Adler

  Inspirational, Fashion, Self

  Renata Adler (1969). “A year in the dark: journal of a film critic, 1968-69”

  5 Copy quote

• Nothing defines the quality of life in a community more clearly than people who regard themselves, or whom the consensus chooses to regard, as mentally unwell.

  Renata Adler

  People, Community, Quality

  Renata Adler (1970). “Toward a radical middle: fourteen pieces of reporting and criticism”

  7 Copy quote

• Moral self-infatuation has its own corruptions, after all. With time, almost every other principle of the magazine acquired an ironic echo, a sort of cackling aftermath.

  Renata Adler

  Time, Echoes, Self

  Renata Adler (1999). “Gone: The Last Days of the New Yorker”

  4 Copy quote

• Sanity ... is the most profound moral option of our time.

  Renata Adler

  Profound, Moral, Sanity

  Renata Adler (2013). “Speedboat”, p.8, New York Review of Books

  6 Copy quote

• The writer has a grudge against society, which he documents with accounts of unsatisfying sex, unrealized ambition, unmitigated loneliness, and a sense of local and global distress. The square, overpopulation, the bourgeois, the bomb and the cocktail party are variously identified as sources of the grudge. There follows a little obscenity here, a dash of philosophy there, considerable whining overall, and a modern satirical novel is born.

  Renata Adler

  Sex, Philosophy, Loneliness

  20 Copy quote

• There is a difference, of course, between real sentiment and the trash of shared experience.

  Renata Adler

  Real, Differences, Feelings

  Renata Adler (2013). “Speedboat”, p.97, New York Review of Books

  4 Copy quote

• I took a little celebrational nap.

  Renata Adler

  Naps, Littles

  Renata Adler (2013). “Speedboat”, p.14, New York Review of Books

  4 Copy quote

• Do you realize how angry you sound?” must be one of the most infuriating questions in the language.

  Renata Adler

  Sound, Language, Realizing

  7 Copy quote

• Lyda was an exuberant, even a dramatic gardener.... She was always holding up a lettuce or a bunch of radishes with an air of resolute courage, as though she had shot them herself.

  Renata Adler

  Garden, Air, Dramatic

  13 Copy quote

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