Renata Adler

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

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

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

“People who are less happy, I find, are always consoling those who are more.”

“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.”

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

“There are times when every act, no matter how private or unconscious, becomes political. Whom you live with, how you wear your hair, whether you marry, whether you insist that your child take piano lessons, what are the brand names on your shelf; all these become political decisions. At other times, no act--no campaign or tract, statement or rampage--has any political charge at all. People with the least sense of which times are, and which are not, political are usually most avid about politics. At six one morning, Will went out in jeans and a frayed sweater to buy a quart of milk. A tourist bus went by. The megaphone was directed at him. "There's one," it said. That was in the 1960's. Ever since, he's wondered. There's one what?”

“Do you realize how angry you sound?” must be one of the most infuriating questions in the language.”

“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.”

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

“Sometimes I think they are writers who do not write. 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 that write at all.”

“he writer has a grudge against society, which he documents with accounts of unsatisfying sex, unrealized ambition, unmitigated lo neliness, and a sense of local and global distress. The square, overpopulation, the bourgeois, the bomb and the cocktail party are variously identified as sources of the grudge. There follows a little obscenity here, a dash of philosophy there, considerable whining overall, and a modern satirical novel is born.”

“But you are, you know, you were, the nearest thing to a real story to happen in my life”

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