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The first divorce in the world may have been a tragedy, but the hundred-millionth is not necessarily one.

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
First
World
Millionth
Divorce
Necessarily
Tragedy
Hundred
May
Firsts

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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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Sometimes it seems that we might have been happier if we had once had an aristocracy to blame everything on.
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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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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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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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The moment a book is lent I begin to miss it.
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Chic is a convent for unloved women.
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We don't simply read books. We become 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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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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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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Rome was a poem pressed into service as a city.
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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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Either a writer doesn't want to talk about his work, or he talks about it more than you want.
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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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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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Two people making love, she once said, are like one drowned person resuscitating the other.
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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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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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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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