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There are few things more subtly distressing than an inappropriate gift from someone close to you.

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
Close
Someone
Things
Subtly
Distressing
Inappropriate
Gift

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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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We are all tourists in history, and irony is what we win in wars.
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Aphorisms are bad for novels. They stick in the reader's teeth.
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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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Either a writer doesn't want to talk about his work, or he talks about it more than you want.
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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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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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The first divorce in the world may have been a tragedy, but the hundred-millionth is not necessarily one.
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We don't simply read books. We become them.
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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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When friends stop being frank and useful to each other, the whole world loses some of its radiance.
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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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The contents of someone's bookcase are part of his history, like an ancestral portrait.
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