Anatole Broyard

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

— Anatole Broyard

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

— Anatole Broyard

For years they have been using the role of 'sex object' as a cover while they spied out the land.

— Anatole Broyard

Rome was a poem pressed into service as a city.

— Anatole Broyard

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

— Anatole Broyard

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

— Anatole Broyard

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

— Anatole Broyard

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

— Anatole Broyard

His father, Vincent, took him to La Coupole in Paris and, after sitting on the terrace for a while, walked off and…

— Anatole Broyard

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

— Anatole Broyard

A whole generation of writers dined out on the dialectic between original cultures and their culture by progress. They became traveling salesmen…

— Anatole Broyard

The more I like a book, the more slowly I read. this spontaneous talking back to a book is one of the…

— Anatole Broyard

“I realize that people still read books now and some people actually love them, but in 1946 in the Village our feelings…

— Anatole Broyard

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

— Anatole Broyard

“A good book is never exhausted. It goes on whispering to you from the wall. Books perfume and give weight to a…

— Anatole Broyard

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

— Anatole Broyard

A bookcase is as good as a view, as much of a panorama as the sight of a city or a river.…

— Anatole Broyard

The epic implications of being human end in more than this: We start our lives as if they were momentous stories, with…

— Anatole Broyard

“The thought of people reading in the sun, on a beach, tempts me to recommend dark books, written in the shadow of…

— Anatole Broyard

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

— Anatole Broyard

People ... have no idea what a hard job it is for two writers to be friends. Sooner or later you have…

— Anatole Broyard

Chic is a convent for unloved women.

— Anatole Broyard

There was a time when we expected nothing of our children but obedience, as opposed to the present, when we expect everything…

— Anatole Broyard