Anatole Broyard
Anatole Broyard
Anatole Paul Broyardwas an American writer, literary critic and editor born in New Orleans who wrote for The New York Times. In addition to his many reviews and columns, he published short stories, essays, and two books during his lifetime. His autobiographical works, Intoxicated by My Illnessand Kafka Was the Rage: A Greenwich Village Memoir, were published after his death. He had moved to Brooklyn, New York with his family as a youth...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth16 July 1920
CountryUnited States of America
Anatole Broyard quotes about
The first divorce in the world may have been a tragedy, but the hundred-millionth is not necessarily one.
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.
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.
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.
To choose a writer for a friend is like palling around with your cardiologist, who might be musing as you talk to him that you are a sinking man. A writer's love for another writer is never quite free of malice. He may enjoy discussing your failures even more than you do. He probably sees you as tragic, like his characters - or unworthy of tragedy, which is worse.
Aphorisms are bad for novels. They stick in the reader's teeth.
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.
Either a writer doesn't want to talk about his work, or he talks about it more than you want.
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.
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.
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.
The contents of someone's bookcase are part of his history, like an ancestral portrait.
His father, Vincent, took him to La Coupole in Paris and, after sitting on the terrace for a while, walked off and forgot him. It was the perfect start in life for a writer.
The midnight snack of a life in its 70s.