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We don't simply read books. We become them.

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
Become
Book
Simply
Books
Read

More quotes by 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.
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Paranoids are the only ones who notice things anymore.
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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.
Anatole Broyard
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Two people making love, she once said, are like one drowned person resuscitating the other.
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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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Rome was a poem pressed into service as a city.
Anatole Broyard
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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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Either a writer doesn't want to talk about his work, or he talks about it more than you want.
Anatole Broyard
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Aphorisms are bad for novels. They stick in the reader's teeth.
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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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.
Anatole Broyard
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The contents of someone's bookcase are part of his history, like an ancestral portrait.
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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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.
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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Chic is a convent for unloved women.
Anatole Broyard
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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.
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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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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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.
Anatole Broyard