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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
Tones
Classical
Native
Tone
Anxiety
Fiction
American
Form
Fosters

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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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For years they have been using the role of 'sex object' as a cover while they spied out the land.
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Paranoids are the only ones who notice things anymore.
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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 remember a table in BarchesterTowers that had more character than the combined heroes of three recent novels I've read.
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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 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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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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An aphorism is a generalization of sorts, and our present-day writers seem more at home with the particular.
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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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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 are few things more subtly distressing than an inappropriate gift from someone close to you.
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The contents of someone's bookcase are part of his history, like an ancestral portrait.
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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 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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When friends stop being frank and useful to each other, the whole world loses some of its radiance.
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