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

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There are few things more subtly distressing than an inappropriate gift from someone close to you.
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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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If a book is really good, it deserves to be read again, and if it's great, it should be read at least three times.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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The moment a book is lent I begin to miss it.
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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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Paranoids are the only ones who notice things anymore.
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Two people making love, she once said, are like one drowned person resuscitating the other.
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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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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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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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Sometimes it seems that we might have been happier if we had once had an aristocracy to blame everything on.
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Rome was a poem pressed into service as a city.
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