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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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Anatole Broyard
Age: 70 †
Born: 1920
Born: July 16
Died: 1990
Died: October 11
Author
Journalist
Literary Critic
Writer
New Orleans
Louisiana
Friends
People
Idea
Jobs
Two
Ideas
Sooner
Writers
Hard
Later
Writing
Talk
Work

More quotes by Anatole Broyard

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We don't simply read books. We become them.
Anatole Broyard
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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.
Anatole Broyard
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Sometimes it seems that we might have been happier if we had once had an aristocracy to blame everything on.
Anatole Broyard
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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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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.
Anatole Broyard
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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.
Anatole Broyard
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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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Paranoids are the only ones who notice things anymore.
Anatole Broyard
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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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Rome was a poem pressed into service as a city.
Anatole Broyard
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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.
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.
Anatole Broyard
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Aphorisms are bad for novels. They stick in the reader's teeth.
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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Ruefulness is one of the classical tones of American fiction. It fosters a native, deglamorized form of anxiety.
Anatole Broyard
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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.
Anatole Broyard
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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.
Anatole Broyard
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The moment a book is lent I begin to miss it.
Anatole Broyard
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Two people making love, she once said, are like one drowned person resuscitating the other.
Anatole Broyard