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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
Subtly
Distressing
Inappropriate
Gift
Close
Someone
Things

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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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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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An aphorism is a generalization of sorts, and our present-day writers seem more at home with the particular.
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We don't simply read books. We become them.
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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.
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Chic is a convent for unloved women.
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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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We are all tourists in history, and irony is what we win in wars.
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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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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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Rome was a poem pressed into service as a city.
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The contents of someone's bookcase are part of his history, like an ancestral portrait.
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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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Ruefulness is one of the classical tones of American fiction. It fosters a native, deglamorized form of anxiety.
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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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Aphorisms are bad for novels. They stick in the reader's teeth.
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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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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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