Quotes from Renata Adler

Last night at dinner, a man said that, on principle, he never answers his telephone. Somebody asked him how he reached people. "I call them," he said. "But suppose they don't believe in answering, either?" I thought of phones ringing all over New York, no one answering.

You cannot be forever watching for the point, or you lose the simplest thing: being a major character in your own life.

His lawyer looks bored," I said. Jim reached for his drink. "You always try to look bored," he said, "when your client is committing perjury.

The slowest-talking man I know tends to loom in elevator doors, in hallways, booths, and other narrow places.

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.

People have been modeling their lives after films for years, but the medium is somehow unsuited to moral lessons, cautionary tales or polemics of any kind.

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

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

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.

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.

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

Moral self-infatuation has its own corruptions, after all. With time, almost every other principle of the magazine acquired an ironic echo, a sort of cackling aftermath.

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

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

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

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

Lyda was an exuberant, even a dramatic gardener.... She was always holding up a lettuce or a bunch of radishes with an air of resolute courage, as though she had shot them herself.

Fear is forward. No one is afraid of yesterday.