Renata Adler Quotes
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.
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.
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.
There follows a little obscenity here, a dash of philosophy there, considerable whining overall, and a modern satirical novel is born.
My dislike has no consequences. It accrues only in my mind—like preserves on a shelf or guns zeroing in, and never firing.
No one ever confides a secret to one person only. No one destroys all copies of a document.
My capacity for having a good time exists. It surfaces, however, on odd occasions.
Do you realize how angry you sound?” must be one of the most infuriating questions in the language.
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.
The whole magic of a plot requires that somebody be impeded from getting something over with.
In the strange heat all litigation brings to bear on things, the very process of litigation fosters the most profound misunderstandings in the world.
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.
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.
The style of flirtation specific to classrooms was of service to the students all their lives.
There are so many different types of writers. It's just sheer coincidence that they're all called writers.
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.
A favorite strategy was the paragraph-terminating: Right? Followed immediately by Wrong. This linear invitation to a mugging was considered a strategy of wit.
Hardly anyone about whom I deeply care at all resembles anyone else I have ever met, or heard of, or read about in literature.
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.
the time for prizes and competitions at art festivals is over. Competition is too closely tied to values that are alien to the arts.
There are times when every act, no matter how private and unconscious, becomes political.
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.
The radical intelligence in the moderate position is the only place where the center holds. Or so it seems.
There is a difference, of course, between real sentiment and the trash of shared experience.
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.
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.
But you are, you know, you were, the nearest thing to a real story to happen in my life
