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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.

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

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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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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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The first divorce in the world may have been a tragedy, but the hundred-millionth is not necessarily one.
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We are all tourists in history, and irony is what we win in wars.
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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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The contents of someone's bookcase are part of his history, like an ancestral portrait.
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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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Aphorisms are bad for novels. They stick in the reader's teeth.
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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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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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There are few things more subtly distressing than an inappropriate gift from someone close to you.
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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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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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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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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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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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