Anatole Broyard Quotes

Aphorisms are bad for novels. They stick in the reader's teeth.

The contents of someone's bookcase are part of his history, like an ancestral portrait.

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.

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.

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.

Rome was a poem pressed into service as a city.

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 more I like a book, the more reluctant I am to turn the page. Lovers, even book lovers, tend to cling. No one-night stands or "reads" for them.

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.

There are few things more subtly distressing than an inappropriate gift from someone close to you.

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.

We are all tourists in history, and irony is what we win in wars.

When friends stop being frank and useful to each other, the whole world loses some of its radiance.

Either a writer doesn't want to talk about his work, or he talks about it more than you want.

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.

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.

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.

Chic is a convent for unloved women.

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.

Two people making love, she once said, are like one drowned person resuscitating the other.

We don't simply read books. We become them.

Ruefulness is one of the classical tones of American fiction. It fosters a native, deglamorized form of anxiety.

There is something about seeing real people on a stage that makes a bad play more intimately, more personally offensive than any other art form.

Sometimes it seems that we might have been happier if we had once had an aristocracy to blame everything on.

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

The more I like a book, the more slowly I read. this spontaneous talking back to a book is one of the things that makes reading so valuable.

A whole generation of writers dined out on the dialectic between original cultures and their culture by "progress.

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

Paranoids are the only ones who notice things anymore.

The contents of someone's bookcase are part of his history, like an ancestral port