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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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Aphorisms are bad for novels. They stick in the reader's teeth.
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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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We don't simply read books. We become them.
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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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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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Two people making love, she once said, are like one drowned person resuscitating the other.
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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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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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Paranoids are the only ones who notice things anymore.
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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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The contents of someone's bookcase are part of his history, like an ancestral portrait.
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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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I feel about lending a book the way most fathers feel about their daughters living with a man out of wedlock.
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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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We are all tourists in history, and irony is what we win in wars.
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A bookcase is as good as a view, as much of a panorama as the sight of a city or a river. There are dawns and sunsets in books - storms and zephyrs.
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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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Ruefulness is one of the classical tones of American fiction. It fosters a native, deglamorized form of anxiety.
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Chic is a convent for unloved women.
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