Quote

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

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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
Turn
Reluctant
Reading
Reads
Turns
Cling
Night
Stands
Book
Page
Even
Lovers
Like
Tend
Pages

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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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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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An aphorism is a generalization of sorts, and our present-day writers seem more at home with the particular.
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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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Aphorisms are bad for novels. They stick in the reader's teeth.
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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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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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When friends stop being frank and useful to each other, the whole world loses some of its radiance.
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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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Paranoids are the only ones who notice things anymore.
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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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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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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.
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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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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 are few things more subtly distressing than an inappropriate gift from someone close to you.
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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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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.
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