Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Anatole Broyard
Age: 70 †
Born: 1920
Born: July 16
Died: 1990
Died: October 11
Author
Journalist
Literary Critic
Writer
New Orleans
Louisiana
Play
Letter
Important
Letters
Writing
Age
Like
Forget
People
Lives
Given
Part
Used

More quotes by Anatole Broyard

Image
We don't simply read books. We become them.
Anatole Broyard
Image
I feel about lending a book the way most fathers feel about their daughters living with a man out of wedlock.
Anatole Broyard
Image
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.
Anatole Broyard
Image
Chic is a convent for unloved women.
Anatole Broyard
Image
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
Image
I remember a table in BarchesterTowers that had more character than the combined heroes of three recent novels I've read.
Anatole Broyard
Image
A whole generation of writers dined out on the dialectic between original cultures and their culture by progress.
Anatole Broyard
Image
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.
Anatole Broyard
Image
Sometimes it seems that we might have been happier if we had once had an aristocracy to blame everything on.
Anatole Broyard
Image
The moment a book is lent I begin to miss it.
Anatole Broyard
Image
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.
Anatole Broyard
Image
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.
Anatole Broyard
Image
Paranoids are the only ones who notice things anymore.
Anatole Broyard
Image
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.
Anatole Broyard
Image
When friends stop being frank and useful to each other, the whole world loses some of its radiance.
Anatole Broyard
Image
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.
Anatole Broyard
Image
An aphorism is a generalization of sorts, and our present-day writers seem more at home with the particular.
Anatole Broyard
Image
The first divorce in the world may have been a tragedy, but the hundred-millionth is not necessarily one.
Anatole Broyard
Image
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.
Anatole Broyard
Image
There are few things more subtly distressing than an inappropriate gift from someone close to you.
Anatole Broyard