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
I feel about lending a book the way most fathers feel about their daughters living with a man out of wedlock.
When friends stop being frank and useful to each other, the whole world loses some of its radiance.
Sex almost always disappoints me in novels. Everything can be said or done now, and that's what I often find: everything, a feeling of generality or dispersal. But in my experience, true sex is so particular, so peculiar to the person who yearns for it. Only he or she, and no one else, would desire so very much that very person under those circumstances. In fiction, I miss that sense of terrific specificity.
An aphorism is a generalization of sorts, and our present-day writers seem more at home with the particular.
I remember a table in BarchesterTowers that had more character than the combined heroes of three recent novels I've read.
Chic is a convent for unloved women.
Sometimes it seems that we might have been happier if we had once had an aristocracy to blame everything on.
Ruefulness is one of the classical tones of American fiction. It fosters a native, deglamorized form of anxiety.
A whole generation of writers dined out on the dialectic between original cultures and their culture by "progress.
Rome was a poem pressed into service as a city.
There are few things more subtly distressing than an inappropriate gift from someone close to you.
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.
For years they have been using the role of 'sex object' as a cover while they spied out the land.
Two people making love, she once said, are like one drowned person resuscitating the other.