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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

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Two people making love, she once said, are like one drowned person resuscitating the other.
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There are few things more subtly distressing than an inappropriate gift from someone close to you.
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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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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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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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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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Paranoids are the only ones who notice things anymore.
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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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The contents of someone's bookcase are part of his history, like an ancestral portrait.
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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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Aphorisms are bad for novels. They stick in the reader's teeth.
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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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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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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 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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We don't simply read books. We become them.
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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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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 slowly I read. this spontaneous talking back to a book is one of the things that makes reading so valuable.
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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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