60 Quotes by Anatole Broyard

Chic is a convent for unloved women.

I remember a table in BarchesterTowers that had more character than the combined heroes of three recent novels I've read.

An aphorism is a generalization of sorts, and our present-day writers seem more at home with the particular.

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.

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.

Paranoids are the only ones who notice things anymore.

The moment a book is lent I begin to miss it.

I feel about lending a book the way most fathers feel about their daughters living with a man out of wedlock.

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