77 Quotes by Renata Adler

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.