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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
Like
Bookcases
Ancestral
Contents
Portrait
Portraits
History
Someone
Part
Bookcase

More quotes by Anatole Broyard

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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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Paranoids are the only ones who notice things anymore.
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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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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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For years they have been using the role of 'sex object' as a cover while they spied out the land.
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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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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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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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Sometimes it seems that we might have been happier if we had once had an aristocracy to blame everything on.
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We don't simply read books. We become them.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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Either a writer doesn't want to talk about his work, or he talks about it more than you want.
Anatole Broyard
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Rome was a poem pressed into service as a city.
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.
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We are all tourists in history, and irony is what we win in wars.
Anatole Broyard