Quote

Aphorisms are bad for novels. They stick in the reader's teeth.

Anatole Broyard

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Anatole Broyard
Age: 70 †
Born: 1920
Born: July 16
Died: 1990
Died: October 11
Author
Journalist
Literary Critic
Writer
New Orleans
Louisiana
Sticks
Teeth
Reader
Novel
Aphorisms
Aphorism
Novels
Stick

More quotes by Anatole Broyard

Image
Rome was a poem pressed into service as a city.
Anatole Broyard
Image
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
Image
We don't simply read books. We become them.
Anatole Broyard
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Either a writer doesn't want to talk about his work, or he talks about it more than you want.
Anatole Broyard
Image
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
Image
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
Image
I remember a table in BarchesterTowers that had more character than the combined heroes of three recent novels I've read.
Anatole Broyard
Image
Sometimes it seems that we might have been happier if we had once had an aristocracy to blame everything on.
Anatole Broyard
Image
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
Image
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
Image
There are few things more subtly distressing than an inappropriate gift from someone close to you.
Anatole Broyard
Image
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
Image
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
Image
The contents of someone's bookcase are part of his history, like an ancestral portrait.
Anatole Broyard
Image
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
Image
A bookcase is as good as a view, as much of a panorama as the sight of a city or a river. There are dawns and sunsets in books - storms and zephyrs.
Anatole Broyard
Image
Paranoids are the only ones who notice things anymore.
Anatole Broyard