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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
Form
Fosters
Tones
Classical
Native
Tone
Anxiety
Fiction
American
More quotes by Anatole Broyard
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.
Anatole Broyard
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.
Anatole Broyard
When friends stop being frank and useful to each other, the whole world loses some of its radiance.
Anatole Broyard
Aphorisms are bad for novels. They stick in the reader's teeth.
Anatole Broyard
I remember a table in BarchesterTowers that had more character than the combined heroes of three recent novels I've read.
Anatole Broyard
The moment a book is lent I begin to miss it.
Anatole Broyard
Either a writer doesn't want to talk about his work, or he talks about it more than you want.
Anatole Broyard
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
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.
Anatole Broyard
Chic is a convent for unloved women.
Anatole Broyard
We don't simply read books. We become them.
Anatole Broyard
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
Rome was a poem pressed into service as a city.
Anatole Broyard
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.
Anatole Broyard
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
I feel about lending a book the way most fathers feel about their daughters living with a man out of wedlock.
Anatole Broyard
The contents of someone's bookcase are part of his history, like an ancestral portrait.
Anatole Broyard
The first divorce in the world may have been a tragedy, but the hundred-millionth is not necessarily one.
Anatole Broyard
A whole generation of writers dined out on the dialectic between original cultures and their culture by progress.
Anatole Broyard
An aphorism is a generalization of sorts, and our present-day writers seem more at home with the particular.
Anatole Broyard
