Quotes by Anatole Broyard

“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.”

“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.”

“To be misunderstood can be the writers punishment for having disturbed the readers peace. The greater the disturbance, the greater the possibility of misunderstanding.”

“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 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 ones self.”

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

“It is one of the paradoxes of American literature that our writers are forever looking back with love and nostalgia at lives they couldnt wait to leave.”

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

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

“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.”

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

“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 others work.”

“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.”

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

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

“Either a writer doesnt want to talk about his work, or he talks about it more than you want.”

“The midnight snack of a life in its 70s.”

“Rome was a poem pressed into service as a city.”

A good book is never exhausted. It goes on whispering to you from the wall. Books perfume and give weight to a room. A bookcase is as good as a view, as the sight of a city or a river. There are dawns and sunsets in books - storms, fogs, zephyrs. I read about a family whose apartment consists of a series of spaces so strictly planned that they are obliged to give away their books as soon as theyve read them. I think they have misunderstood the way books work. Reading a book is only the first step in the relationship. After youve finished it, the book enters on its real career. It stand there as a badge, a blackmailer, a monument, a scar. Its both a flaw in the room, like a crack in the plaster, and a decoration. The contents of someones bookcase are part of his history, like an ancestral port