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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
Many
Tension
Feel
Instance
Feels
Debate
Life
Makes
Cannot
Human
Humans
Interminable
Self
Instances
More quotes by Anatole Broyard
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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For years they have been using the role of 'sex object' as a cover while they spied out the land.
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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
Two people making love, she once said, are like one drowned person resuscitating the other.
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Chic is a convent for unloved women.
Anatole Broyard
Either a writer doesn't want to talk about his work, or he talks about it more than you want.
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 whole generation of writers dined out on the dialectic between original cultures and their culture by progress.
Anatole Broyard
Aphorisms are bad for novels. They stick in the reader's teeth.
Anatole Broyard
An aphorism is a generalization of sorts, and our present-day writers seem more at home with the particular.
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
We don't simply read books. We become them.
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The contents of someone's bookcase are part of his history, like an ancestral portrait.
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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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There are few things more subtly distressing than an inappropriate gift from someone close to you.
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.
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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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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
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
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
