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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.

Anatole Broyard

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Anatole Broyard
Age: 70 †
Born: 1920
Born: July 16
Died: 1990
Died: October 11
Author
Journalist
Literary Critic
Writer
New Orleans
Louisiana
Idea
Jobs
Two
Ideas
Sooner
Hard
Writers
Writing
Later
Work
Talk
People
Friends

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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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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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There are few things more subtly distressing than an inappropriate gift from someone close to you.
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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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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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The contents of someone's bookcase are part of his history, like an ancestral portrait.
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Two people making love, she once said, are like one drowned person resuscitating the other.
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We don't simply read books. We become them.
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Rome was a poem pressed into service as a city.
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Paranoids are the only ones who notice things anymore.
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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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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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Either a writer doesn't want to talk about his work, or he talks about it more than you want.
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Aphorisms are bad for novels. They stick in the reader's teeth.
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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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Ruefulness is one of the classical tones of American fiction. It fosters a native, deglamorized form of anxiety.
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Travel is like adultery: one is always tempted to be unfaithful to one's own country. To have imagination is inevitably to be dissatisfied with where you live. There is in men, as Peter Quennell said, a centrifugal tendency. In our wanderlust, we are lovers looking for consummation.
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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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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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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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