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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.
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
Feels
Debate
Life
Makes
Cannot
Human
Humans
Interminable
Self
Instances
Many
Tension
Feel
Instance
More quotes by Anatole Broyard
Either a writer doesn't want to talk about his work, or he talks about it more than you want.
Anatole Broyard
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
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
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
Sometimes it seems that we might have been happier if we had once had an aristocracy to blame everything on.
Anatole Broyard
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
Aphorisms are bad for novels. They stick in the reader's teeth.
Anatole Broyard
The moment a book is lent I begin to miss it.
Anatole Broyard
Two people making love, she once said, are like one drowned person resuscitating the other.
Anatole Broyard
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
I feel about lending a book the way most fathers feel about their daughters living with a man out of wedlock.
Anatole Broyard
Chic is a convent for unloved women.
Anatole Broyard
The contents of someone's bookcase are part of his history, like an ancestral portrait.
Anatole Broyard
We are all tourists in history, and irony is what we win in wars.
Anatole Broyard
When friends stop being frank and useful to each other, the whole world loses some of its radiance.
Anatole Broyard
Rome was a poem pressed into service as a city.
Anatole Broyard
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.
Anatole Broyard
Paranoids are the only ones who notice things anymore.
Anatole Broyard
There are few things more subtly distressing than an inappropriate gift from someone close to you.
Anatole Broyard
Ruefulness is one of the classical tones of American fiction. It fosters a native, deglamorized form of anxiety.
Anatole Broyard
