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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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Anatole Broyard
Age: 70 †
Born: 1920
Born: July 16
Died: 1990
Died: October 11
Author
Journalist
Literary Critic
Writer
New Orleans
Louisiana
Contents
Portrait
Portraits
History
Someone
Bookcase
Part
Bookcases
Like
Ancestral

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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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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.
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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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We are all tourists in history, and irony is what we win in wars.
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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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The moment a book is lent I begin to miss it.
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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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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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Either a writer doesn't want to talk about his work, or he talks about it more than you want.
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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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Aphorisms are bad for novels. They stick in the reader's teeth.
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We don't simply read books. We become them.
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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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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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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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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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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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There are few things more subtly distressing than an inappropriate gift from someone close to you.
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