Quote

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

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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
Makes
Back
Spontaneity
Spontaneous
Book
Slowly
Things
Valuable
Like
Reading
Talking
Read

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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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Chic is a convent for unloved women.
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Paranoids are the only ones who notice things anymore.
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Rome was a poem pressed into service as a city.
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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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Sometimes it seems that we might have been happier if we had once had an aristocracy to blame everything on.
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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.
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There are few things more subtly distressing than an inappropriate gift from someone close to you.
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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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When friends stop being frank and useful to each other, the whole world loses some of its radiance.
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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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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.
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I remember a table in BarchesterTowers that had more character than the combined heroes of three recent novels I've read.
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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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Either a writer doesn't want to talk about his work, or he talks about it more than you want.
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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 don't simply read books. We become them.
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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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Two people making love, she once said, are like one drowned person resuscitating the other.
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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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