Renata Adler Quotes

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.
Renata Adler
The style of flirtation specific to classrooms was of service to the students all their lives.
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 indifferent to dislike, even relish it. Hardly anyone I know.
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
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
But you are, you know, you were, the nearest thing to a real story to happen in my life
Renata Adler
Do you realize how angry you sound?” must be one of the most infuriating questions in the language.
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 write at all.
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 these become political decisions. At other times, no act--no campaign or tract, statement or rampage--has any political charge at all. People with the least sense of which times are, and which are not, political are usually most avid about politics. At six one morning, Will went out in jeans and a 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 1960's. Ever since, he's wondered. There's one what?
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 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
Self-pity” is just sadness, I think, in the pejorative.
Renata Adler
People who are less happy, I find, are always consoling those who are more.
Renata Adler