Renata Adler Quotes

“I think when you are truly stuck, when you have stood still in the same spot for too long, you throw a grenade in exactly the spot you were standing in, and jump, and pray. It is the momentum of last resort.”

Renata Adler

Source: Speedboat

“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 who write at all.”

Renata Adler

Source: Speedboat

“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

Source: Speedboat

“This is my little disquisition about football: the quarterback, the center, and the towel. Page 116”

Renata Adler

Pitch Dark (1983)

“But we do not normally mistake progressions of weakness, the loss of the simple capacity to escape, for the onset of love. Page 17”

Renata Adler

Pitch Dark (1983)

“Here, on the other hand, with an ingenuity that should take an entrepreneurial schemer’s breath away, there has evolved the following proposition: that a legal job no sooner comes into existence than it generates, immediately and of necessity, a job for a competitor. Page 118”

Renata Adler

Pitch Dark (1983)