Renata Adler Quotations

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.

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

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

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

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

It is always self-defeating to pretend to 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.

At six one morning, Will went out in jeans and frayed sweater to buy a quart of milk. A tourist bus went by. The megaphone was directed at him. "There's one," it said. That was in the l960s. Ever since, he's wondered. There's one what?

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.

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."

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

I took a little celebrational nap.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.