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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.

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
Back
Couldn
Love
Leave
Forever
Paradoxes
Waiting
Hygiene
Literature
Nostalgia
Looking
Paradox
American
Wait
Lives
Writers

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The contents of someone's bookcase are part of his history, like an ancestral portrait.
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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 first divorce in the world may have been a tragedy, but the hundred-millionth is not necessarily one.
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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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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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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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The moment a book is lent I begin to miss it.
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A book is meant not only to be read, but to haunt you, to importune you like a lover or a parent, to be in your teeth like a piece of gristle.
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The more I like a book, the more slowly I read. this spontaneous talking back to a book is one of the things that makes reading so valuable.
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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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Chic is a convent for unloved women.
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Two people making love, she once said, are like one drowned person resuscitating the other.
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Paranoids are the only ones who notice things anymore.
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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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Ruefulness is one of the classical tones of American fiction. It fosters a native, deglamorized form of anxiety.
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Aphorisms are bad for novels. They stick in the reader's teeth.
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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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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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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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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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