Quotes by Renata Adler

About Renata Adler:

Renata Adler is an American author, journalist and film critic.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Do you realize how angry you sound?” must be one of the most infuriating questions in the language.

Renata Adler

The style of flirtation specific to classrooms was of service to the students all their lives.

Renata Adler

My capacity for having a good time exists. It surfaces, however, on odd occasions.

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

The pressures were wrong. There was just enough money and not enough time.

Renata Adler

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 indiffer...

Renata Adler

Self-pity” is just sadness, I think, in the pejorative.

Renata Adler

The second rat, of course, may have been the first rat farther uptown, in which case I am either being followed or the rat keeps the same rounds and hours I do. I think sanity, however, is the most profound moral option of our time. Two rats, then.

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 m...

Renata Adler

Sometimes I think they are writers who do not write. 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 that w...

Renata Adler

he writer has a grudge against society, which he documents with accounts of unsatisfying sex, unrealized ambition, unmitigated lo neliness, and a sense of local and global distress. The square, overpopulation, the bourgeois, the bomb and the cocktail...

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

Bored people, unless they sleep a lot, are cruel.

Renata Adler

No one ever confides a secret to one person only. No one destroys all copies of a document.

Renata Adler

There are times when every act, no matter how private or unconscious, becomes political. Whom you live with, how you wear your hair, whether you marry, whether you insist that your child take piano lessons, what are the brand names on your shelf; all...

Renata Adler

It is always self-defeating to pretend to a generation younger than your own; it simply erases your own experience in history.

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

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

Author Bio

  • NameRenata Adler
  • DescriptionAmerican author, journalist and film critic
  • BornOctober 19, 1938
  • CountryUnited States Of America; Germany
  • ProfessionNovelist; Journalist
  • AwardsGuggenheim Fellowship