Quote

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.

Renata Adler

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Renata Adler
Age: 86
Born: 1938
Born: October 19
Author
Film Critic
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
Milano
Italia
Brett Daniels
Self
Meant
Writing
Writers
Like
Drink
Rant
People
Sleep
Evident
Write
Hardly
True
Phone
Find
Phones
Ever
Mets

More quotes by Renata Adler

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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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The style of flirtation specific to classrooms was of service to the students all their lives.
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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.
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Do you realize how angry you sound?” must be one of the most infuriating questions in the language.
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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.
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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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Being neurotic seemed to be a kind of wild card, an all-purpose explanation.
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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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The style of flirtation specific to classrooms was of service to the students all their lives.
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There follows a little obscenity here, a dash of philosophy there, considerable whining overall, and a modern satirical novel is born.
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the time for prizes and competitions at art festivals is over. Competition is too closely tied to values that are alien to the arts.
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I took a little celebrational nap.
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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.
Renata Adler
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My capacity for having a good time exists. It surfaces, however, on odd occasions.
Renata Adler
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I love the laconic. Clearly, I am not of their number.
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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.
Renata Adler
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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.
Renata Adler
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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.
Renata Adler
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Did I throw the most important thing perhaps, by accident, away?
Renata Adler
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A favorite strategy was the paragraph-terminating: Right? Followed immediately by Wrong. This linear invitation to a mugging was considered a strategy of wit.
Renata Adler