Renata Adler (born October 19, 1937) is an American author, journalist, and film critic.
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.
The style of flirtation specific to classrooms was of service to the students all their lives.
My capacity for having a good time exists. It surfaces, however, on odd occasions.
Sanity. . . is the most profound moral option of our time.
The radical intelligence in the moderate position is the only place where the center holds. Or so it seems.
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.
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.
I love the laconic. Clearly, I am not of their number.
In the strange heat all litigation brings to bear on things, the very process of litigation fosters the most profound misunderstandings in the world.
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.
No one ever confides a secret to one person only. No one destroys all copies of a document.
There are times when every act, no matter how private and unconscious, becomes political
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.
The whole magic of a plot requires that somebody be impeded from getting something over with.
There are so many different types of writers. It's just sheer coincidence that they're all called writers.
My dislike has no consequences. It accrues only in my mind—like preserves on a shelf or guns zeroing in, and never firing.
There is a difference, of course, between real sentiment and the trash of shared experience.
Most movies are not very good. Most people know it and like to see them anyway.
Though films become more daring sexually, they are probably less sexy than they ever were. There haven't been any convincing love scenes or romances in the movies in a while. (Nobody even seems to neck in theaters any more. ). . . when the mechanics and sadism quotients go up, the movie love interest goes dead, and the film just lies there, giving a certain amount of offense.
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.