Bored people, unless they sleep a lot, are cruel. (Renata Adler)
No one ever confides a secret to one person only. No one destroys all copies of a document. (Renata Adler)
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. (Renata Adler)
The writer has a grudge against society, which he documents with accounts of unsatisfying sex, unrealized ambition, unmitigated loneliness, and a sense of local and global distress. (Renata Adler)
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. (Renata Adler)
It is always self-defeating to pretend to a generation younger than your own; it simply erases your own experience in history. (Renata Adler)
There follows a little obscenity here, a dash of philosophy there, considerable whining overall, and a modern satirical novel is born. (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 preoccupations in our time. (Renata Adler)
Fear... is forward. No one is afraid of yesterday. (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 cackling aftermath. (Renata Adler)
At six one morning, Will went out in jeans and 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 l960s. Ever since, he's wondered. There's one what. (Renata Adler)
In the strange heat all litigation brings to bear on things, the very process of litigation fosters the most profound misunderstandings in the world. (Renata Adler)