Anatole Broyard Quotes

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

Rome was a poem pressed into service as a city.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

Paranoids are the only ones who notice things anymore.

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.

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

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.