Renata Adler Quotes

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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."

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

I took a little celebrational nap.

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

Being neurotic seemed to be a kind of wild card, an all-purpose explanation.

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.