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

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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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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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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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Sometimes it seems that we might have been happier if we had once had an aristocracy to blame everything on.
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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 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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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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When friends stop being frank and useful to each other, the whole world loses some of its radiance.
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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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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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An aphorism is a generalization of sorts, and our present-day writers seem more at home with the particular.
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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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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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A whole generation of writers dined out on the dialectic between original cultures and their culture by progress.
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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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Either a writer doesn't want to talk about his work, or he talks about it more than you want.
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