77 Quotes by Renata Adler

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.

I took a little celebrational nap.

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.

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

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.

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

In almost every thriller, a point is reached when someone, usually calling from a phone booth, telephones with a vital piece of information, which he cannot divulge by phone. By the time the hero arrives at the place where they had arranged to meet, the caller is dead, or too near death to tell. There is never an explanation for the reluctance of the caller to impart his message in the first place.

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.

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