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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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Anatole Broyard
Age: 70 †
Born: 1920
Born: July 16
Died: 1990
Died: October 11
Author
Journalist
Literary Critic
Writer
New Orleans
Louisiana
Remember
Novels
Character
Heroes
Table
Tables
Hero
Novel
Read
Combined
Three
Recent

More quotes by 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.
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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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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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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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Paranoids are the only ones who notice things anymore.
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Aphorisms are bad for novels. They stick in the reader's teeth.
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We don't simply read books. We become them.
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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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When friends stop being frank and useful to each other, the whole world loses some of its radiance.
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An aphorism is a generalization of sorts, and our present-day writers seem more at home with the particular.
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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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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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Sometimes it seems that we might have been happier if we had once had an aristocracy to blame everything on.
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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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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.
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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.
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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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Chic is a convent for unloved women.
Anatole Broyard
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Rome was a poem pressed into service as a city.
Anatole Broyard