Renata Adler

Author, Journalist

Renata Adler is an American author and critic known for her incisive commentary on truth and identity, particularly in her work 'Speedboat.'

Born
February 19, 1938
Quotes
46
Rank
#1801

Quote collection

Renata Adler quotes (page 2 of 3)

46 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.

Renata Adler Author, Journalist
Popular

"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."

Read quote 5 likes
Renata Adler Author, Journalist
Popular

"Sanity ... is the most profound moral option of our time."

Read quote 5 likes
Renata Adler Author, Journalist
Popular

"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."

Read quote 4 likes
Renata Adler Author, Journalist
Popular

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

Read quote 4 likes
Renata Adler Author, Journalist
Popular

"the time for prizes and competitions at art festivals is over. Competition is too closely tied to values that are alien to the arts."

Read quote 3 likes
Renata Adler Author, Journalist
Popular

"If you once cede to the Court the power to decide elections, let alone even the power to halt counting of the votes, then you have ceded it everything."

Read quote 3 likes
Renata Adler Author, Journalist
Popular

"Hardly anyone about whom I deeply care at all resembles anyone else I have ever met, or heard of, or read about in literature."

Read quote 3 likes
Renata Adler Author, Journalist
Popular

"A favorite strategy was the paragraph-terminating: Right? Followed immediately by Wrong. This linear invitation to a mugging was considered a strategy of wit."

Read quote 3 likes
Renata Adler Author, Journalist
Popular

"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."

Read quote 3 likes
Renata Adler Author, Journalist
Popular

"There are so many different types of writers. It's just sheer coincidence that they're all called writers."

Read quote 3 likes
Renata Adler Author, Journalist
Popular

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

Read quote 3 likes
Renata Adler Author, Journalist
Popular

"There are times when every act, no matter how private and unconscious, becomes political."

Read quote 3 likes
Renata Adler Author, Journalist
Popular

"My grandmother refused to concede that any member of the family died of natural causes. An uncle's cancer in middle age occurred because all the suitcases fell off the luggage rack onto him when he was in his teens, and so forth. Death was an acquired characteristic."

Read quote 3 likes
Renata Adler Author, Journalist
Popular

"Intelligent people, caught at anything, denied it. Faced with evidence of having denied it falsely, people said they had not done it and had not lied about it, and didn't remember it, but if they had done it, or lied about it, they would have done it and misspoken themselves about it in an interest so much higher as to alter the nature of doing and lying altogether."

Read quote 3 likes
Renata Adler Author, Journalist
Popular

"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."

Read quote 3 likes
Renata Adler Author, Journalist
Popular

"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."

Read quote 3 likes
Renata Adler Author, Journalist
Popular

"Being neurotic seemed to be a kind of wild card, an all-purpose explanation."

Read quote 3 likes
Renata Adler Author, Journalist
Popular

"The radical intelligence in the moderate position is the only place where the center holds. Or so it seems."

Read quote 3 likes
Renata Adler Author, Journalist
Popular

"I took a little celebrational nap."

Read quote 3 likes