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Ruefulness is one of the classical tones of American fiction. It fosters a native, deglamorized form of anxiety.

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
Classical
Native
Tone
Anxiety
Fiction
American
Form
Fosters
Tones

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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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When friends stop being frank and useful to each other, the whole world loses some of its radiance.
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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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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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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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For years they have been using the role of 'sex object' as a cover while they spied out the land.
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There are few things more subtly distressing than an inappropriate gift from someone close to you.
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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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We don't simply read books. We become them.
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Two people making love, she once said, are like one drowned person resuscitating the other.
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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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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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The moment a book is lent I begin to miss it.
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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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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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Either a writer doesn't want to talk about his work, or he talks about it more than you want.
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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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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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