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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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Anatole Broyard
Age: 70 †
Born: 1920
Born: July 16
Died: 1990
Died: October 11
Author
Journalist
Literary Critic
Writer
New Orleans
Louisiana
Writers
Seem
Present
Particular
Seems
Home
Aphorism
Generalization
Sorts

More quotes by Anatole Broyard

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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.
Anatole Broyard
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We don't simply read books. We become them.
Anatole Broyard
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Chic is a convent for unloved women.
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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Rome was a poem pressed into service as a city.
Anatole Broyard
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Two people making love, she once said, are like one drowned person resuscitating the other.
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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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.
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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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.
Anatole Broyard
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Paranoids are the only ones who notice things anymore.
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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There are few things more subtly distressing than an inappropriate gift from someone close to you.
Anatole Broyard
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We are all tourists in history, and irony is what we win in wars.
Anatole Broyard
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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.
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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The contents of someone's bookcase are part of his history, like an ancestral portrait.
Anatole Broyard
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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.
Anatole Broyard
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Ruefulness is one of the classical tones of American fiction. It fosters a native, deglamorized form of anxiety.
Anatole Broyard
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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.
Anatole Broyard