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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
Government
Might
Everything
Sometimes
Aristocracy
Happier
Blame
Seems

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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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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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Aphorisms are bad for novels. They stick in the reader's teeth.
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The contents of someone's bookcase are part of his history, like an ancestral portrait.
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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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Chic is a convent for unloved women.
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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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Two people making love, she once said, are like one drowned person resuscitating the other.
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We don't simply read books. We become them.
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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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Rome was a poem pressed into service as a city.
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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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Paranoids are the only ones who notice things anymore.
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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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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 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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A whole generation of writers dined out on the dialectic between original cultures and their culture by progress.
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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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