Quote

Paranoids are the only ones who notice things anymore.

Anatole Broyard

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Anatole Broyard
Age: 70 †
Born: 1920
Born: July 16
Died: 1990
Died: October 11
Author
Journalist
Literary Critic
Writer
New Orleans
Louisiana
Notice
Anymore
Ones
Things

More quotes by Anatole Broyard

Image
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
Image
We are all tourists in history, and irony is what we win in wars.
Anatole Broyard
Image
The moment a book is lent I begin to miss it.
Anatole Broyard
Image
I feel about lending a book the way most fathers feel about their daughters living with a man out of wedlock.
Anatole Broyard
Image
There are few things more subtly distressing than an inappropriate gift from someone close to you.
Anatole Broyard
Image
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
Image
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
Image
An aphorism is a generalization of sorts, and our present-day writers seem more at home with the particular.
Anatole Broyard
Image
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
Image
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
Image
We don't simply read books. We become them.
Anatole Broyard
Image
Ruefulness is one of the classical tones of American fiction. It fosters a native, deglamorized form of anxiety.
Anatole Broyard
Image
The contents of someone's bookcase are part of his history, like an ancestral portrait.
Anatole Broyard
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Two people making love, she once said, are like one drowned person resuscitating the other.
Anatole Broyard
Image
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.
Anatole Broyard
Image
For years they have been using the role of 'sex object' as a cover while they spied out the land.
Anatole Broyard
Image
A whole generation of writers dined out on the dialectic between original cultures and their culture by progress.
Anatole Broyard
Image
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