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

More quotes by Anatole Broyard

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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.
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Two people making love, she once said, are like one drowned person resuscitating the other.
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The contents of someone's bookcase are part of his history, like an ancestral portrait.
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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 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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The moment a book is lent I begin to miss it.
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Paranoids are the only ones who notice things anymore.
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We are all tourists in history, and irony is what we win in wars.
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A book is meant not only to be read, but to haunt you, to importune you like a lover or a parent, to be in your teeth like a piece of gristle.
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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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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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Rome was a poem pressed into service as a city.
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Ruefulness is one of the classical tones of American fiction. It fosters a native, deglamorized form of anxiety.
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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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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.
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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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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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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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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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