Renata Adler

Did I throw the most important thing perhaps, by accident, away?

— Renata Adler

If you once cede to the Court the power to decide elections, let alone even the power to halt counting of the…

— Renata Adler

Idle people are often bored and bored people, unless they sleep a lot, are cruel. It is not accident that boredom and…

— Renata Adler

Hardly anyone about whom I deeply care at all resembles anyone else I have ever met, or heard of, or read about…

— Renata Adler

“…a kind of Calvinist in reverse; that is, he was uncompromisingly bohemian”

— Renata Adler

Lyda was an exuberant, even a dramatic gardener.... She was always holding up a lettuce or a bunch of radishes with an…

— Renata Adler

The writer has a grudge against society, which he documents with accounts of unsatisfying sex, unrealized ambition, unmitigated loneliness, and a sense…

— Renata Adler

“Aldo said he was bored to tearsies by my grandmother's diminutives.”

— Renata Adler

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

— Renata Adler

“A rowboat, without oars. An outboard motor. As you can sit there for years, forever, with that outboard motor, pulling again, and…

— Renata Adler

In the strange heat all litigation brings to bear on things, the very process of litigation fosters the most profound misunderstandings in…

— Renata Adler

“…the particular consequence of his moral vanity was that when he did people an injury, he never forgave them. Never again.”

— Renata Adler

In almost every thriller, a point is reached when someone, usually calling from a phone booth, telephones with a vital piece of…

— Renata Adler

There follows a little obscenity here, a dash of philosophy there, considerable whining overall, and a modern satirical novel is born.

— Renata Adler

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

— Renata Adler

I took a little celebrational nap.

— Renata Adler

The motion picture is like journalism in that, more than any of the other arts, it confers celebrity. Not just on people…

— Renata Adler

I love the laconic. Clearly, I am not of their number.

— Renata Adler

People have been modeling their lives after films for years, but the medium is somehow unsuited to moral lessons, cautionary tales or…

— 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…

— 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…

— Renata Adler

The whole magic of a plot requires that somebody be impeded from getting something over with.

— Renata Adler

“Is it always the same story, then? Somebody loves and somebody doesn't, or loves less, or loves someone else. Or someone is…

— Renata Adler

“What is the point. That is what must be borne in mind. Sometimes the point is really who wants what. Sometimes the…

— Renata Adler

“There are times when every act, no matter how private or unconscious, becomes political. Whom you live with, how you wear your…

— Renata Adler