Renata Adler Quotes
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Fear . . . is forward. No one is afraid of yesterday.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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My capacity for having a good time exists. It surfaces, however, on odd occasions.
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Most movies are not very good. Most people know it and like to see them anyway.
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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.
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Self-pity” is just sadness, I think, in the pejorative.
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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.
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My dislike has no consequences. It accrues only in my mind—like preserves on a shelf or guns zeroing in, and never firing.
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No one ever confides a secret to one person only. No one destroys all copies of a document.
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Bored people, unless they sleep a lot, are cruel.