A whole generation of writers dined out on the dialectic between original cultures and their culture by progress. They became traveling salesmen of metaphors.
– Anatole Broyard
Aphorisms are bad for novels. They stick in the reader's teeth.
– Anatole Broyard
His father, Vincent, took him to La Coupole in Paris and, after sitting on the terrace for a while, walked off and forgot him. It was the perfect start in life for a writer.
– Anatole Broyard
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
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
Lapped in poetry, wrapped in the picturesque, armed with logical sentences and inalienable words.
– Anatole Broyard
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
Rome was a poem pressed into service as a city.
– Anatole Broyard
Ruefulness is one of the classical tones of American fiction. It fosters a native, deglamorized form of anxiety.
– Anatole Broyard
She was a spendthrift of the spirit, an American in Paris when, as Evelyn Waugh said, the going was good.
– Anatole Broyard
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.
– Anatole Broyard
The first divorce in the world may have been a tragedy, but the hundred-millionth is not necessarily one.
– Anatole Broyard
The midnight snack of a life in its 70s.
– 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
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
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
There was a time when we expected nothing of our children but obedience, as opposed to the present, when we expect everything of them but obedience.
– 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
We are all tourists in history, and irony is what we win in wars.
– Anatole Broyard
When friends stop being frank and useful to each other, the whole world loses some of its radiance.