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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

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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.
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Chic is a convent for unloved women.
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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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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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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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We don't simply read books. We become them.
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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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Sometimes it seems that we might have been happier if we had once had an aristocracy to blame everything on.
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The moment a book is lent I begin to miss it.
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Two people making love, she once said, are like one drowned person resuscitating the other.
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The contents of someone's bookcase are part of his history, like an ancestral portrait.
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There are few things more subtly distressing than an inappropriate gift from someone close to you.
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Ruefulness is one of the classical tones of American fiction. It fosters a native, deglamorized form of anxiety.
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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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We are all tourists in history, and irony is what we win in wars.
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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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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.
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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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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
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The first divorce in the world may have been a tragedy, but the hundred-millionth is not necessarily one.
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