Anatole Broyard Quotes

Quotes about:

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

  Anatole Broyard

  Portraits, Bookcases

  "About Books, Recoiling, Rereading, Retelling". New York Times, February 22, 1987.

  47 Copy quote

• Rome was a poem pressed into service as a city.

  Anatole Broyard

  Rome, Cities

  16 Copy quote

• 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.

  Anatole Broyard

  Book, Three, Should

  19 Copy quote

• Travel is like adultery: one is always tempted to be unfaithful to one's own country. To have imagination is inevitably to be dissatisfied with where you live. There is in men, as Peter Quennell said, "a centrifugal tendency." In our wanderlust, we are lovers looking for consummation.

  Anatole Broyard

  Country, Travel, Men

  16 Copy quote

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

  Anatole Broyard

  Inappropriate, Distressing

  Anatole Broyard (1980). “Men, Women, and Other Anticlimaxes”, Routledge Kegan & Paul

  13 Copy quote

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

  Anatole Broyard

  Divorce, Tragedy, World

  15 Copy quote

• 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.

  Anatole Broyard

  Self, Yes And No, Debate

  13 Copy quote

• 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.

  Anatole Broyard

  Writing, Play, People

  19 Copy quote

• 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.

  Anatole Broyard

  Book, Sunset, Sight

  14 Copy quote

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

  Anatole Broyard

  War, Winning, Tourism

  12 Copy quote

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

  Anatole Broyard

  Friendship, Advice, Being Sad

  11 Copy quote

• 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.

  Anatole Broyard

  Sex, Writing, Missing

  7 Copy quote

• 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.

  Anatole Broyard

  Love, Hygiene, Waiting

  Anatole Broyard (1974). “Aroused by Books”, Random House (NY)

  13 Copy quote

• 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 are a sinking man. A writer's love for another writer is never quite free of malice. He may enjoy discussing your failures even more than you do. He probably sees you as tragic, like his characters - or unworthy of tragedy, which is worse.

  Anatole Broyard

  Character, Men, Tragedy

  9 Copy quote

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

  Anatole Broyard

  Writing, Want

  11 Copy quote

• 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.

  Anatole Broyard

  Punishment, Misunderstood, Possibility

  23 Copy quote

• 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.

  Anatole Broyard

  Book, Parent, Teeth

  10 Copy quote

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

  Anatole Broyard

  Book

  5 Copy quote

• 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. I just want love to live up to its publicity.

  Anatole Broyard

  People, Different, Want

  7 Copy quote

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

  Anatole Broyard

  Hero, Character, Three

  1974 Aroused by Books.

  7 Copy quote

• 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 middle and an appropriate end, only to find that they are mostly middles.

  Anatole Broyard

  Epic, Stories, Being Human

  8 Copy quote

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

  Anatole Broyard

  Book, Missing, Moments

  4 Copy quote

• Paranoids are the only ones who notice things anymore.

  Anatole Broyard

  4 Copy quote

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

  Anatole Broyard

  Teeth, Sticks, Aphorism

  "Books of the Times", New York Times, June 6, 1984.

  86 Copy quote

• 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.

  Anatole Broyard

  Relationship, Children, Obedience

  8 Copy quote

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