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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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Renata Adler
Age: 86
Born: 1938
Born: October 19
Author
Film Critic
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
Milano
Italia
Brett Daniels
Tells
Criticism
Negative
Nice
Something
Writerly
Good
Invective
Clich
Nasty

More quotes by Renata Adler

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There are times when every act, no matter how private and unconscious, becomes political.
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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.
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The whole magic of a plot requires that somebody be impeded from getting something over with.
Renata Adler
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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.
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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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the time for prizes and competitions at art festivals is over. Competition is too closely tied to values that are alien to the arts.
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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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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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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The style of flirtation specific to classrooms was of service to the students all their lives.
Renata Adler
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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.
Renata Adler
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Do you realize how angry you sound?” must be one of the most infuriating questions in the language.
Renata Adler
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There is a difference, of course, between real sentiment and the trash of shared experience.
Renata Adler
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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.
Renata Adler
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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.
Renata Adler
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No one ever confides a secret to one person only. No one destroys all copies of a document.
Renata Adler
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Being neurotic seemed to be a kind of wild card, an all-purpose explanation.
Renata Adler
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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.
Renata Adler
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My capacity for having a good time exists. It surfaces, however, on odd occasions.
Renata Adler