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We are all tourists in history, and irony is what we win in wars.

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
History
Tourism
Tourists
Irony
Wars
Winning
War

More quotes by Anatole Broyard

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Rome was a poem pressed into service as a city.
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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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Paranoids are the only ones who notice things anymore.
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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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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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We don't simply read books. We become them.
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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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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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Two people making love, she once said, are like one drowned person resuscitating the other.
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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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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 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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The contents of someone's bookcase are part of his history, like an ancestral portrait.
Anatole Broyard
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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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Aphorisms are bad for novels. They stick in the reader's teeth.
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.
Anatole Broyard
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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.
Anatole Broyard
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The moment a book is lent I begin to miss it.
Anatole Broyard
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There are few things more subtly distressing than an inappropriate gift from someone close to you.
Anatole Broyard
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Chic is a convent for unloved women.
Anatole Broyard