Quotes from Anatole Broyard

The contents of someone's bookcase are part of his history, like an ancestral portrait.

The contents of someone's bookcase are part of his history, like and ancestral portrait.

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.

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.

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.

I remember [Meyer] Schapiro telling us that before Cézanne, there had always been a place in landscape painting where the viewer could walk into the picture. There was an entrance; you could go there, like walking into a park. But this was not true of Cézanne's landscapes, which were cut off absolutely, abstracted from their context. You could not walk into them—you could enter them only through art, by leaping. Anatole Broyard, Kafka Was the Rage

I had conceived of lovemaking as a sort of asking and answering of questions, but with us it only led to further questions, until we seemed to be locked in a philosophical debate. Instead of the proverbial sadness after sex, I felt something like a semantic despair.

Betty is by now a rudderless drunk, cast out by her husband and making heavy weather around the bars of Versailles. Simenon is at his finest in establishing his heroine's fuzzy states of mind at this point. The novel then revolves about the relationship between Betty and Laure Lavancher, a physician's widow who takes Betty in and nurses her back to malevolence. Simenon readers know enough not to expect rainbows.

It seemed to me that a penis was a very primitive instrument for dealing with life.

What I brought to Dr. Schachtel was not a condition or a situation but a poetics. 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. Of course, that's what all patients want, but the irony was that with me it might have worked. It might have been the shortest, or the only, way through my defenses, because I had a literature rather than a personality, a set of fictions about myself.

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.

Rome was a poem pressed into service as a city.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Either a writer doesn't want to talk about his work, or he talks about it more than you want.

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.

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.

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.

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.

When friends stop being frank and useful to each other, the whole world loses some of its radiance.