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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
World
Millionth
Divorce
Necessarily
Tragedy
Hundred
May
Firsts
First

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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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An aphorism is a generalization of sorts, and our present-day writers seem more at home with the particular.
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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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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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For years they have been using the role of 'sex object' as a cover while they spied out the land.
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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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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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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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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 moment a book is lent I begin to miss it.
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Aphorisms are bad for novels. They stick in the reader's teeth.
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Ruefulness is one of the classical tones of American fiction. It fosters a native, deglamorized form of anxiety.
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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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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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Two people making love, she once said, are like one drowned person resuscitating the other.
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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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Sometimes it seems that we might have been happier if we had once had an aristocracy to blame everything on.
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Chic is a convent for unloved women.
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