Anatole Broyard Quotes
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For years they have been using the role of 'sex object' as a cover while they spied out the land.
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Two people making love, she once said, are like one drowned person resuscitating the other.
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In an age like ours, which is not given to letter-writing, we forget what an important part it used to play in people's lives.
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Chic is a convent for unloved women.
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To choose a writer for a friend is like palling around with your cardiologist, who might be musing as you talk to him that you are a sinking man. A writer's love for another writer is never quite free of malice. He may enjoy discussing your failures even more than you do. He probably sees you as tragic, like his characters - or unworthy of tragedy, which is worse.
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Rome was a poem pressed into service as a city.
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The first divorce in the world may have been a tragedy, but the hundred-millionth is not necessarily one.
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The epic implications of being human end in more than this: We start our lives as if they were momentous stories, with a beginning, a middle and an appropriate end, only to find that they are mostly middles.
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People ... have no idea what a hard job it is for two writers to be friends. Sooner or later you have to talk about each other's work.
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The contents of someone's bookcase are part of his history, like an ancestral portrait.
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The tension between 'yes' and no', between 'I can' and 'I cannot,' makes us feel that, in so many instances, human life is an interminable debate with one's self.
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A whole generation of writers dined out on the dialectic between original cultures and their culture by "progress.
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The more I like a book, the more reluctant I am to turn the page. Lovers, even book lovers, tend to cling. No one-night stands or "reads" for them.
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When friends stop being frank and useful to each other, the whole world loses some of its radiance.
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I feel about lending a book the way most fathers feel about their daughters living with a man out of wedlock.
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The moment a book is lent I begin to miss it.
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To be misunderstood can be the writer's punishment for having disturbed the reader's peace. The greater the disturbance, the greater the possibility of misunderstanding.
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Aphorisms are bad for novels. They stick in the reader's teeth.
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In novels, I said, people are transfigured by love. They’re elevated, made different, lifted out of their ordinariness…It’s not so much to ask, I said. I just want love to live up to its publicity.
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It is one of the paradoxes of American literature that our writers are forever looking back with love and nostalgia at lives they couldn't wait to leave.
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A bookcase is as good as a view, as much of a panorama as the sight of a city or a river. There are dawns and sunsets in books - storms and zephyrs.
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Ruefulness is one of the classical tones of American fiction. It fosters a native, deglamorized form of anxiety.
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Either a writer doesn't want to talk about his work, or he talks about it more than you want.
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Paranoids are the only ones who notice things anymore.
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I remember a table in BarchesterTowers that had more character than the combined heroes of three recent novels I've read.
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There is something about seeing real people on a stage that makes a bad play more intimately, more personally offensive than any other art form.
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Sometimes it seems that we might have been happier if we had once had an aristocracy to blame everything on.
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We are all tourists in history, and irony is what we win in wars.
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An aphorism is a generalization of sorts, and our present-day writers seem more at home with the particular.
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There was a time when we expected nothing of our children but obedience, as opposed to the present, when we expect everything of them but obedience.
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