Quote

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

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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
Something
Stage
People
Vision
Seeing
Makes
Art
Form
Intimately
Play
Offensive
Real
Personally

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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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Paranoids are the only ones who notice things anymore.
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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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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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Rome was a poem pressed into service as a city.
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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.
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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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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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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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We don't simply read books. We become them.
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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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Ruefulness is one of the classical tones of American fiction. It fosters a native, deglamorized form of anxiety.
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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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Two people making love, she once said, are like one drowned person resuscitating the other.
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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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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.
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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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An aphorism is a generalization of sorts, and our present-day writers seem more at home with the particular.
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A whole generation of writers dined out on the dialectic between original cultures and their culture by progress.
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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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