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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
Hero
Novel
Read
Combined
Three
Recent
Remember
Novels
Character
Heroes
Table
Tables

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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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The moment a book is lent I begin to miss it.
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Rome was a poem pressed into service as a city.
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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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Chic is a convent for unloved women.
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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 whole generation of writers dined out on the dialectic between original cultures and their culture by progress.
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Aphorisms are bad for novels. They stick in the reader's teeth.
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The contents of someone's bookcase are part of his history, like an ancestral portrait.
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We are all tourists in history, and irony is what we win in wars.
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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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Paranoids are the only ones who notice things anymore.
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Two people making love, she once said, are like one drowned person resuscitating the other.
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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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Ruefulness is one of the classical tones of American fiction. It fosters a native, deglamorized form of anxiety.
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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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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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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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When friends stop being frank and useful to each other, the whole world loses some of its radiance.
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