Renata Adler said this quote

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

~ Renata Adler

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

~ Renata Adler

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.

~ Renata Adler

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.

~ Renata Adler