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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
Seems
Home
Aphorism
Generalization
Sorts
Writers
Seem
Present
Particular

More quotes by 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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Ruefulness is one of the classical tones of American fiction. It fosters a native, deglamorized form of anxiety.
Anatole Broyard
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We don't simply read books. We become them.
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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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 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 moment a book is lent I begin to miss it.
Anatole Broyard
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Paranoids are the only ones who notice things anymore.
Anatole Broyard
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Chic is a convent for unloved women.
Anatole Broyard
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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.
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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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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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
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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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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.
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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There are few things more subtly distressing than an inappropriate gift from someone close to you.
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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Either a writer doesn't want to talk about his work, or he talks about it more than you want.
Anatole Broyard