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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.

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
Important
Letters
Writing
Age
Like
Forget
People
Lives
Given
Part
Used
Play
Letter

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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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An aphorism is a generalization of sorts, and our present-day writers seem more at home with the particular.
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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 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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Aphorisms are bad for novels. They stick in the reader's teeth.
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Paranoids are the only ones who notice things anymore.
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We are all tourists in history, and irony is what we win in wars.
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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.
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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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Chic is a convent for unloved women.
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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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Ruefulness is one of the classical tones of American fiction. It fosters a native, deglamorized form of anxiety.
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Rome was a poem pressed into service as a city.
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We don't simply read books. We become them.
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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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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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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 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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The first divorce in the world may have been a tragedy, but the hundred-millionth is not necessarily one.
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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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