Anatole Broyard Quotes

35 quotes in 498 categories

• 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.
• 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…
• 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.
• Either a writer doesn't want to talk about his work, or he talks about it more than you want.
• 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…
• We are all tourists in history, and irony is what we win in wars.
• People ... have no idea what a hard job it is for two writers to be friends. Sooner or later you have to talk about…
• 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 contents of someone's bookcase are part of his history, like an ancestral portrait.
• 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…
• 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…
• 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.…
• 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…
• Aphorisms are bad for novels. They stick in the reader's teeth.
• 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…
• The epic implications of being human end in more than this: We start our lives as if they were momentous stories, with a beginning, a…
• 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…
• 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…

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