Renata Adler

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

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

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

There follows a little obscenity here, a dash of philosophy there, considerable whining overall, and a modern satirical novel is born.

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.

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?

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

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.

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

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.