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Sometimes it seems that we might have been happier if we had once had an aristocracy to blame everything on.

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
Sometimes
Aristocracy
Happier
Blame
Seems
Government
Might
Everything

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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 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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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 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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Aphorisms are bad for novels. They stick in the reader's teeth.
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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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When friends stop being frank and useful to each other, the whole world loses some of its radiance.
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For years they have been using the role of 'sex object' as a cover while they spied out the land.
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Rome was a poem pressed into service as a city.
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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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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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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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An aphorism is a generalization of sorts, and our present-day writers seem more at home with the particular.
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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 moment a book is lent I begin to miss it.
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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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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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The contents of someone's bookcase are part of his history, like an ancestral portrait.
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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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