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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
Might
Everything
Sometimes
Aristocracy
Happier
Blame
Seems
Government

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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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When friends stop being frank and useful to each other, the whole world loses some of its radiance.
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The contents of someone's bookcase are part of his history, like an ancestral portrait.
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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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I remember a table in BarchesterTowers that had more character than the combined heroes of three recent novels I've read.
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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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An aphorism is a generalization of sorts, and our present-day writers seem more at home with the particular.
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Chic is a convent for unloved women.
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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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Aphorisms are bad for novels. They stick in the reader's teeth.
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We don't simply read books. We become them.
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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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Rome was a poem pressed into service as a city.
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The moment a book is lent I begin to miss it.
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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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There are few things more subtly distressing than an inappropriate gift from someone close to you.
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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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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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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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