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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.

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
Book
Great
Really
Deserves
Good
Deserve
Least
Read
Times
Three

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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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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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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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An aphorism is a generalization of sorts, and our present-day writers seem more at home with the particular.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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Sometimes it seems that we might have been happier if we had once had an aristocracy to blame everything on.
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Rome was a poem pressed into service as a city.
Anatole Broyard
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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 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.
Anatole Broyard
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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.
Anatole Broyard
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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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For years they have been using the role of 'sex object' as a cover while they spied out the land.
Anatole Broyard