"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."
Read quote
52 likes
Quote collection
Renata Adler quotes (page 1 of 3)
46 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"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."
Read quote
50 likes
"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."
Read quote
19 likes
"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."
Read quote
18 likes
"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."
Read quote
12 likes
"Bored people, unless they sleep a lot, are cruel."
Read quote
12 likes
"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."
Read quote
11 likes
"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."
Read quote
10 likes
"There follows a little obscenity here, a dash of philosophy there, considerable whining overall, and a modern satirical novel is born."
Read quote
8 likes
"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."
Read quote
8 likes
"Fear . . . is forward. No one is afraid of yesterday."
Read quote
8 likes
"My capacity for having a good time exists. It surfaces, however, on odd occasions."
Read quote
7 likes
"No one ever confides a secret to one person only. No one destroys all copies of a document."
Read quote
7 likes
"My dislike has no consequences. It accrues only in my mind—like preserves on a shelf or guns zeroing in, and never firing."
Read quote
7 likes
"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."
Read quote
6 likes
"I love the laconic. Clearly, I am not of their number."
Read quote
6 likes
"In the strange heat all litigation brings to bear on things, the very process of litigation fosters the most profound misunderstandings in the world."
Read quote
6 likes
"Do you realize how angry you sound?” must be one of the most infuriating questions in the language."
Read quote
6 likes
"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."
Read quote
6 likes
"The whole magic of a plot requires that somebody be impeded from getting something over with."
Read quote
6 likes