13 Anatole Broyard Quotes

Anatole Broyard quotes

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

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. A whole generation of writers dined out on the dialectic between original cultures and their culture by "progress.

5. 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.

6. 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.

7. 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.

8. Paranoids are the only ones who notice things anymore.

9. 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.

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

11. 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.

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