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

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Anatole Broyard
Age: 70 †
Born: 1920
Born: July 16
Died: 1990
Died: October 11
Author
Journalist
Literary Critic
Writer
New Orleans
Louisiana
Reader
Writer
Greater
Disturbance
Peace
Misunderstanding
Disturbed
Misunderstood
Punishment
Possibility

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The first divorce in the world may have been a tragedy, but the hundred-millionth is not necessarily one.
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We are all tourists in history, and irony is what we win in wars.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Sometimes it seems that we might have been happier if we had once had an aristocracy to blame everything on.
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There are few things more subtly distressing than an inappropriate gift from someone close to you.
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Two people making love, she once said, are like one drowned person resuscitating the other.
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Chic is a convent for unloved women.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I feel about lending a book the way most fathers feel about their daughters living with a man out of wedlock.
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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.
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Paranoids are the only ones who notice things anymore.
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I remember a table in BarchesterTowers that had more character than the combined heroes of three recent novels I've read.
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A whole generation of writers dined out on the dialectic between original cultures and their culture by progress.
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When friends stop being frank and useful to each other, the whole world loses some of its radiance.
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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.
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Rome was a poem pressed into service as a city.
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