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Aphorisms are bad for novels. They stick in the reader's teeth.
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
Reader
Novel
Aphorisms
Aphorism
Novels
Stick
Sticks
Teeth
More quotes by Anatole Broyard
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
The moment a book is lent I begin to miss it.
Anatole Broyard
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.
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.
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
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.
Anatole Broyard
I remember a table in BarchesterTowers that had more character than the combined heroes of three recent novels I've read.
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
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
I feel about lending a book the way most fathers feel about their daughters living with a man out of wedlock.
Anatole Broyard
An aphorism is a generalization of sorts, and our present-day writers seem more at home with the particular.
Anatole Broyard
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
Sometimes it seems that we might have been happier if we had once had an aristocracy to blame everything on.
Anatole Broyard
Either a writer doesn't want to talk about his work, or he talks about it more than you want.
Anatole Broyard
When friends stop being frank and useful to each other, the whole world loses some of its radiance.
Anatole Broyard
The contents of someone's bookcase are part of his history, like an ancestral portrait.
Anatole Broyard
For years they have been using the role of 'sex object' as a cover while they spied out the land.
Anatole Broyard
Two people making love, she once said, are like one drowned person resuscitating the other.
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
