Quote

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.

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
Meant
Pieces
Parent
Gristle
Read
Haunt
Book
Lover
Like
Teeth
Lovers
Piece

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Either a writer doesn't want to talk about his work, or he talks about it more than you want.
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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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Aphorisms are bad for novels. They stick in the reader's teeth.
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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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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.
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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 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.
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Paranoids are the only ones who notice things anymore.
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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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The moment a book is lent I begin to miss it.
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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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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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For years they have been using the role of 'sex object' as a cover while they spied out the land.
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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 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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We don't simply read books. We become them.
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We are all tourists in history, and irony is what we win in wars.
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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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The first divorce in the world may have been a tragedy, but the hundred-millionth is not necessarily one.
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Two people making love, she once said, are like one drowned person resuscitating the other.
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