Anatole Broyard Quotes

The contents of someone's bookcase are part of his history, like an ancestral portrait.
(About Books; Recoiling, Rereading, Retelling, New York Times, February 22, 1987)

— Anatole Broyard

“A good book is never exhausted. It goes on whispering to you from the wall. Books perfume and give weight to a room. A bookcase is as good as a view, as the sight of a city or a river. There are dawns and sunsets in books - storms, fogs, zephyrs.
I read about a family whose apartment consists of a series of spaces so strictly planned that they are obliged to give away their books as soon as they've read them. I think they have misunderstood the way books work.
Reading a book is only the first step in the relationship. After you've finished it, the book enters on its real career. It stand there as a badge, a blackmailer, a monument, a scar. It's both a flaw in the room, like a crack in the plaster, and a decoration. The contents of someone's bookcase are part of his history, like an ancestral portrait.
- in "About books; recoiling, rereading, retelling", The New York Times, February 22, 1987”

— Anatole Broyard

“Two people making love, she once said, are like one drowned person resuscitating the other.”

— 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

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

“The most dangerous part of lending books lies in the returning. At such times, friendships hang by a thread. I look for agony, ecstasy, for tears, transfiguration, trembling hands, a broken voice - but what the borrower usually says is, "I enjoyed it."
I enjoyed it - as if that were what books were for.”

— Anatole Broyard

“For him that stealeth, or borroweth and returneth not, this book from its owner, let it change into a serpent in his hand and rend him. Let him be struck with palsy, and all his members blasted. Let him languish in pain, crying aloud for mercy, and let there be no surcease to this agony till he sing in dissolution. Let bookworms gnaw his entrails ... and when at last he goeth to his final punishment, let the flames of Hell consume him forever.
- Anonymous Curse on Book Theives from the Monaster of San Pedro, Barcelona, Spain”

— 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 moment a book is lent I begin to miss it.”

— Anatole Broyard

“When we were in bed, the only part of me she touched was my penis, because it was the most detached.”

— Anatole Broyard

“Paranoids are the only ones who notice things anymore.”

— 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

“I'm filled with desire-to live, to write, to do everything. Desire itself is a kind of immortality.”

— Anatole Broyard

“The thought of people reading in the sun, on a beach, tempts me to recommend dark books, written in the shadow of loneliness, despair, and death. Let these revelers feel a chill as they loll on their towels.”

— Anatole Broyard

I wanted to discuss my life with him not as a patient talking to an analyst but as if we were two literary critics discussing a novel ... I had a literature rather than a personality, a set of fictions about myself.

— 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 ... in our wanderlust, we are lovers looking for consummation.”

— Anatole Broyard

“Rome was a poem pressed into service as a city.”

— 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

“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

“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

“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

“Lapped in poetry, wrapped in the picturesque, armed with logical sentences and inalienable words.”

— 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

“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

“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

“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.”

— 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 choose a writer for a friend is like palling around with your cardiologist, who might be musing as you talk to him that you are a sinking man. A writer's love for another writer is never quite free of malice. He may enjoy discussing your failures even more than you do. He probably sees you as tragic, like his characters - or unworthy of tragedy, which is worse.”

— Anatole Broyard

“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.”

— Anatole Broyard

“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.”

— Anatole Broyard

“The first divorce in the world may have been a tragedy, but the hundred-millionth is not necessarily one.”

— Anatole Broyard

“Sex almost always disappoints me in novels. Everything can be said or done now, and that's what I often find: everything, a feeling of generality or dispersal. But in my experience, true sex is so particular, so peculiar to the person who yearns for it. Only he or she, and no one else, would desire so very much that very person under those circumstances. In fiction, I miss that sense of terrific specificity.”

— Anatole Broyard

“An aphorism is a generalization of sorts, and our present-day writers seem more at home with the particular.”

— 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

“Chic is a convent for unloved women.”

— Anatole Broyard

“Sometimes it seems that we might have been happier if we had once had an aristocracy to blame everything on.”

— Anatole Broyard