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Rome was a poem pressed into service as a city.

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
Pressed
Rome
Poem
Service
City
Cities

More quotes by Anatole Broyard

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Aphorisms are bad for novels. They stick in the reader's teeth.
Anatole Broyard
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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.
Anatole Broyard
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Two people making love, she once said, are like one drowned person resuscitating the other.
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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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The moment a book is lent I begin to miss it.
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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.
Anatole Broyard
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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.
Anatole Broyard
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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.
Anatole Broyard
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An aphorism is a generalization of sorts, and our present-day writers seem more at home with the particular.
Anatole Broyard
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When friends stop being frank and useful to each other, the whole world loses some of its radiance.
Anatole Broyard
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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.
Anatole Broyard
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Paranoids are the only ones who notice things anymore.
Anatole Broyard
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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.
Anatole Broyard
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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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The first divorce in the world may have been a tragedy, but the hundred-millionth is not necessarily one.
Anatole Broyard
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For years they have been using the role of 'sex object' as a cover while they spied out the land.
Anatole Broyard
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We don't simply read books. We become them.
Anatole Broyard
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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.
Anatole Broyard
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A whole generation of writers dined out on the dialectic between original cultures and their culture by progress.
Anatole Broyard
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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.
Anatole Broyard