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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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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.
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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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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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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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We don't simply read books. We become them.
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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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Either a writer doesn't want to talk about his work, or he talks about it more than you want.
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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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Chic is a convent for unloved women.
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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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A whole generation of writers dined out on the dialectic between original cultures and their culture by progress.
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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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The contents of someone's bookcase are part of his history, like an ancestral portrait.
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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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Ruefulness is one of the classical tones of American fiction. It fosters a native, deglamorized form of anxiety.
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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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We are all tourists in history, and irony is what we win in wars.
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Two people making love, she once said, are like one drowned person resuscitating the other.
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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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The first divorce in the world may have been a tragedy, but the hundred-millionth is not necessarily one.
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