Renata Adler Quotes

Best Quotes by Renata Adler (Top 10)

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
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
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
And then there were the wallflowers who had recognized for years that the thing was hopeless, who had found in that information a kind of calm. They no longer tried, with a bright and desperate effort, to sustain a conversation with somebody's brother, somebody's usher, somebody's roommate, somebody's roommate's usher's brother... The category of wallflower who had given up on all this was very quiet, not indifferent, only quiet. And she always brought a book.
Renata Adler
Bored people, unless they sleep a lot, are cruel.
Renata Adler
Being neurotic seemed to be a kind of wild card, an all-purpose explanation.
Renata Adler
The whole magic of a plot requires that somebody be impeded from getting something over with.
Renata Adler
My capacity for having a good time exists. It surfaces, however, on odd occasions.
Renata Adler
Speech, tennis, music, skiing, manners, love- you try them waking and perhaps balk at the jump, and then you're over. You've caught the rhythm of them once and for all, in your sleep at night. The city, of course, can wreck it. So much insomnia. So many rhythms collide. The salesgirl, the landlord, the guests, the bystanders, sixteen varieties of social circumstance in a day. Everyone has the power to call your whole life into question here. Too many people have access to your state of mind. Some people are indifferent to dislike, even relish it. Hardly anyone I know.
Renata Adler
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

More Renata Adler Quotes

It is always self-defeating to pretend to a generation younger than your own; it simply erases your own experience in history.
Renata Adler
The radical intelligence in the moderate position is the only place where the center holds. Or so it seems.
Renata Adler
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
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.
Renata Adler
In the strange heat all litigation brings to bear on things, the very process of litigation fosters the most profound misunderstandings in the world.
Renata Adler
No one ever confides a secret to one person only. No one destroys all copies of a document.
Renata Adler
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.
Renata Adler
Fear... is forward. No one is afraid of yesterday.
Renata Adler
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.
Renata Adler