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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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Rome was a poem pressed into service as a city.
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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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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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When friends stop being frank and useful to each other, the whole world loses some of its radiance.
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Two people making love, she once said, are like one drowned person resuscitating the other.
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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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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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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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A whole generation of writers dined out on the dialectic between original cultures and their culture by progress.
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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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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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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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For years they have been using the role of 'sex object' as a cover while they spied out the land.
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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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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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Aphorisms are bad for novels. They stick in the reader's teeth.
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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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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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