Anatole Broyard Quotes (21 Quotes)

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

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

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.

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.

His father, Vincent, took him to La Coupole in Paris and, after sitting on the terrace for a while, walked off and forgot him. It was the perfect start in life for a writer.

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

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.

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

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

She was a spendthrift of the spirit, an American in Paris when, as Evelyn Waugh said, the going was good.

Rome was a poem pressed into service as a city.

Lapped in poetry, wrapped in the picturesque, armed with logical sentences and inalienable words.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.