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Home
Authors
Anatole Broyard
American
Critic
About the author
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,
American
Critic
#End
#Being
#Beginning
We are all tourists in history, and irony is what we win in wars.
Anatole Broyard,
American
Critic
#History
#Irony
#Tourists
When friends stop being frank and useful to each other, the whole world loses some of its radiance.
Anatole Broyard,
American
Critic
#World
#Being
#Friends
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,
American
Critic
#Love
#American
#Writers
#Literature
#Nostalgia
#Paradoxes
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,
American
Critic
#People
#Art
#Play
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,
American
Critic
#Peace
#Writer
#Possibility
#Punishment
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,
American
Critic
#Time
#Nothing
#Children
#Present
#Obedience
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,
American
Critic
#Reading
#Talking
Aphorisms are bad for novels. They stick in the reader's teeth.
Anatole Broyard,
American
Critic
#Aphorisms
Rome was a poem pressed into service as a city.
Anatole Broyard,
American
Critic
#Service
#Rome
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,
American
Critic
#Talk
#People
#Work
#Friends
#Idea
#Writers
#Job
Lapped in poetry, wrapped in the picturesque, armed with logical sentences and inalienable words.
Anatole Broyard,
American
Critic
#Words
#Poetry
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,
American
Critic
#Life
#Self
#Debate
#Tension