Anatole Broyard Quotes

How wonderful it is to be able to write someone a letter! To feel like conveying your thoughts to a person, to sit at your desk and pick up a pen, to put your thoughts into words like this is truly marvelous.

I feel like if people are going to go to the effort to get a stamp and, you know, put it on an envelope that, you know, it's a big effort these days. So I often write back.

I am sorry for people who can't write letters. But I suspect also that you and I ... love to write them because it's kind of like working without really doing it.

People write to me all the time, and I write back.

I just happen to be from the generation that, like a lot of my older friends, started out writing letters.

I have always been a letter writer, and I found when my numbers got over half a million, I couldn't think about how many people there were out there. I had to think as if I were writing a letter to my brothers and sisters, to my good friends with whom I have had a correspondence since I could hold a pen.

... writing letters is thinking, just as talking to you is thinking.

Letter writing is an excellent way of slowing down this lunatic helterskelter universe long enough to gather one’s thoughts

I was a pen pal with one guy, a long time ago. I think we only wrote to each other twice. We didn't really keep it up that long. But, I love it. I think it's really sweet and very creative and freeing, when you get to put a pen to paper, 'cause you don't really do it that much these days, with all this technology.

There was a day when I liked writing letters -- it has gone. Unfortunately the passion for getting them remains.

Don't you like to write letters? I do because it's such a swell way to keep from working and yet feel you've done something.

People no longer write letters. Lacking the leisure, and, for the most part, the ability, they dictate dispatches, and scribble messages. When you are in the humor, you should take a peep at some of the letters written by people who lived long ago.

[Henry Miller] was such a scribomaniac that even when he lived in the same house as Lawrence Durrell they often exchanged letters. For most of his life, Henry wrote literally dozens of letters a day to people he could have easily engaged in conversation - and did. The writing process, in short, was essential. As it is to all real writers, writing was life and breath to him. He put out words as a tree puts out leaves.

How I love to get a letter! I can think of nothing better Than perusing an epistolary item. But deep is my despondence, For I've found that correspondence Means that if you want to get 'em, You must write 'em!

Only write to me, write to me, I love to see the hop and skip and sudden starts of your ink.

A letter is never ill-timed; it never interrupts. Instead it waits for us to find the opportune minute, the quiet moment to savor the message. There is an element of timelessness about letter writing.

I realized how valuable the art and practice of writing letters are, and how important it is to remind people of what a treasure letters--handwritten letters--can be. In our throwaway era of quick phone calls, faxes, and email, it's all to easy never to find the time to write letters. That's a great pity--for historians and the rest of us.

Generally, people who are good at writing letters have no need to write letters. They've got plenty of life to lead inside their own context.

As I grow old I hate the writing of letters more and more, and like getting them better and better.

Letter-writing I imagine is counted as 'work' from which you must abstain, and I scribble this letter simply from the self-satisfied notion that you will like to hear from me. You see, I have asked no questions, which are the torture-screws of correspondence. Hence you have nothing to answer.

The proper definition of a man is an animal that writes letters.

Some time all kinds of letters will be published to the ineffable delight of endless readers.

What most of us must be involved in--whether we teach or write, make films, write films, direct films, play music, act, whatever we do--has to not only make people feel good and inspired and at one with other people around them, but also has to educate a new generation to do this very modest thing: change the world.

Never before have I written so long a letter. I'm afraid it is much too long to take your precious time. I can assure you that it would have been much shorter if I had been writing from a comfortable desk, but what else can one do when he is alone in a narrow jail cell, other than write long letters, think long thoughts, and pray long prayers?

Letters should be easy and natural, and convey to the persons to whom we send them just what we should say to the persons if we were with them.