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

- Renata Adler

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

- Renata Adler

There are so many different types of writers. It's just sheer coincidence that they're all called writers.

- Renata Adler

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

- Renata Adler

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 …

- Renata Adler

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 preoccupation…

- Renata Adler

Fear . . . is forward. No one is afraid of yesterday.

- Renata Adler

Self-pity” is just sadness, I think, in the pejorative.

- Renata Adler

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…

- Renata Adler