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

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We are all tourists in history, and irony is what we win in wars.
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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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When friends stop being frank and useful to each other, the whole world loses some of its radiance.
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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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Rome was a poem pressed into service as a city.
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The contents of someone's bookcase are part of his history, like an ancestral portrait.
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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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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 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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Aphorisms are bad for novels. They stick in the reader's teeth.
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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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An aphorism is a generalization of sorts, and our present-day writers seem more at home with the particular.
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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 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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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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Either a writer doesn't want to talk about his work, or he talks about it more than you want.
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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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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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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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Two people making love, she once said, are like one drowned person resuscitating the other.
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