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

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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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A whole generation of writers dined out on the dialectic between original cultures and their culture by progress.
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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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Rome was a poem pressed into service as a city.
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The more I like a book, the more reluctant I am to turn the page. Lovers, even book lovers, tend to cling. No one-night stands or reads for them.
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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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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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The moment a book is lent I begin to miss it.
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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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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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Either a writer doesn't want to talk about his work, or he talks about it more than you want.
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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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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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Sometimes it seems that we might have been happier if we had once had an aristocracy to blame everything on.
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Aphorisms are bad for novels. They stick in the reader's teeth.
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Chic is a convent for unloved women.
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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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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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