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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
Punishment
Possibility
Reader
Writer
Greater
Disturbance
Peace
Misunderstanding
Disturbed
Misunderstood

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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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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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When friends stop being frank and useful to each other, the whole world loses some of its radiance.
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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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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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There are few things more subtly distressing than an inappropriate gift from someone close to you.
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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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An aphorism is a generalization of sorts, and our present-day writers seem more at home with the particular.
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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.
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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.
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We don't simply read books. We become them.
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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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For years they have been using the role of 'sex object' as a cover while they spied out the land.
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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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A whole generation of writers dined out on the dialectic between original cultures and their culture by progress.
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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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Chic is a convent for unloved women.
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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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