Renata Adler Quotes - Page 2

Quotes about:

• Speech, tennis, music, skiing, manners, love- you try them waking and perhaps balk at the jump, and then you're over. You've caught the rhythm of them once and for all, in your sleep at night. The city, of course, can wreck it. So much insomnia. So many rhythms collide. The salesgirl, the landlord, the guests, the bystanders, sixteen varieties of social circumstance in a day. Everyone has the power to call your whole life into question here. Too many people have access to your state of mind. Some people are indifferent to dislike, even relish it. Hardly anyone I know.

  Renata Adler

  Love You, Sleep, Insomnia

  Renata Adler (2013). “Speedboat”, p.7, New York Review of Books

  6 Copy quote

• People have been modeling their lives after films for years, but the medium is somehow unsuited to moral lessons, cautionary tales or polemics of any kind.

  Renata Adler

  Kindness, Years, People

  Renata Adler (2015). “After the Tall Timber: Collected Nonfiction”, p.258, New York Review of Books

  53 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

• Things have changed very much, several times, since I grew up, and, like everyone in New York except the intellectuals, I have led several lives and I still lead some of them.

  Renata Adler

  New York, Grew Up, Changed

  Renata Adler (2013). “Speedboat”, p.10, New York Review of Books

  4 Copy quote

• And then there were the wallflowers who had recognized for years that the thing was hopeless, who had found in that information a kind of calm. They no longer tried, with a bright and desperate effort, to sustain a conversation with somebody's brother, somebody's usher, somebody's roommate, somebody's roommate's usher's brother... The category of wallflower who had given up on all this was very quiet, not indifferent, only quiet. And she always brought a book.

  Renata Adler

  Brother, Book, Years

  4 Copy quote

• In almost every thriller, a point is reached when someone, usually calling from a phone booth, telephones with a vital piece of information, which he cannot divulge by phone. By the time the hero arrives at the place where they had arranged to meet, the caller is dead, or too near death to tell. There is never an explanation for the reluctance of the caller to impart his message in the first place.

  Renata Adler

  Hero, Phones, Calling

  Renata Adler (2013). “Speedboat”, p.100, New York Review of Books

  12 Copy quote

• Intelligent people, caught at anything, denied it. Faced with evidence of having denied it falsely, people said they had not done it and had not lied about it, and didn't remember it, but if they had done it, or lied about it, they would have done it and misspoken themselves about it in an interest so much higher as to alter the nature of doing and lying altogether.

  Renata Adler

  Lying, Intelligent, People

  Renata Adler (2013). “Speedboat”, p.83, New York Review of Books

  4 Copy quote

• My grandmother refused to concede that any member of the family died of natural causes. An uncle's cancer in middle age occurred because all the suitcases fell off the luggage rack onto him when he was in his teens, and so forth. Death was an acquired characteristic.

  Renata Adler

  Uncles, Cancer, Grandmother

  Renata Adler (2013). “Speedboat”, p.62, New York Review of Books

  4 Copy quote

• The style of flirtation specific to classrooms was of service to the students all their lives.

  Renata Adler

  Style, Students, Classroom

  Renata Adler (2013). “Speedboat”, p.153, New York Review of Books

  4 Copy quote

• There are times when every act, no matter how private and unconscious, becomes political.

  Renata Adler

  Political, Matter, Unconscious

  "Speedboat". Book by Renata Adler, www.newyorker.com. 1976.

  4 Copy quote

• Did I throw the most important thing perhaps, by accident, away?

  Renata Adler

  Important, Accidents, Important Things

  Renata Adler (2013). “Pitch Dark”, p.151, New York Review of Books

  4 Copy quote

• In the strange heat all litigation brings to bear on things, the very process of litigation fosters the most profound misunderstandings in the world.

  Renata Adler

  Profound, World, Bears

  7 Copy quote

• Nice criticism is good when it tells you something. A lot of negative "criticism" isn't criticism at all: it's just nasty, "writerly" cliché and invective.

  Renata Adler

  Nice, Criticism, Negative

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

  5 Copy quote

• There are so many different types of writers. It's just sheer coincidence that they're all called writers.

  Renata Adler

  Different, Coincidence, Type

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

  4 Copy quote

• Writing about writing is a bit like talking about a conversation you are having; it tends to obscure desperation about where the next word is coming from.

  Renata Adler

  Writing, Talking, Next

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

  5 Copy quote

• A favorite strategy was the paragraph-terminating: Right? Followed immediately by Wrong. This linear invitation to a mugging was considered a strategy of wit.

  Renata Adler

  Strategy, Linear, Conversation

  Renata Adler (2013). “Speedboat”, p.82, New York Review of Books

  4 Copy quote

• Hardly anyone about whom I deeply care at all resembles anyone else I have ever met, or heard of, or read about in literature.

  Renata Adler

  Literature, Care, Mets

  4 Copy quote

• I love the laconic. Clearly, I am not of their number.

  Renata Adler

  Numbers, Laconic

  Renata Adler (2013). “Speedboat”, p.64, New York Review of Books

  7 Copy quote

• Though films become more daring sexually, they are probably less sexy than they ever were. There haven't been any convincing love scenes or romances in the movies in a while. (Nobody even seems to neck in theaters any more.) ... when the mechanics and sadism quotients go up, the movie love interest goes dead, and the film just lies there, giving a certain amount of offense.

  Renata Adler

  Movie, Sexy, Lying

  7 Copy quote

• If you once cede to the Court the power to decide elections, let alone even the power to halt counting of the votes, then you have ceded it everything.

  Renata Adler

  Election, Vote, Halt

  Renata Adler (2015). “After the Tall Timber: Collected Nonfiction”, p.496, New York Review of Books

  4 Copy quote

• the time for prizes and competitions at art festivals is over. Competition is too closely tied to values that are alien to the arts.

  Renata Adler

  Art, Competition, Festivals

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

  4 Copy quote

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