Top 30 Anatole Broyard Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “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.”

— Anatole Broyard

2. “Chic is a convent for unloved women.”

— Anatole Broyard

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

— Anatole Broyard

4. “We are all tourists in history, and irony is what we win in wars.”

— Anatole Broyard

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

— Anatole Broyard

6. “We don’t simply read books. We become them.”

— Anatole Broyard

7. “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

8. “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

Featured in: Reading Quotes

9. “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

Featured in: Reading Quotes

10. “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.”

— Anatole Broyard

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

— Anatole Broyard

12. “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

13. “I feel about lending a book the way most fathers feel about their daughters living with a man out of wedlock.”

— Anatole Broyard

14. “I remember a table in BarchesterTowers that had more character than the combined heroes of three recent novels I’ve read.”

— Anatole Broyard

15. “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

16. “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

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

— Anatole Broyard

18. “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

19. “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

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

20. “The moment a book is lent I begin to miss it.”

— Anatole Broyard

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

— Anatole Broyard

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

— Anatole Broyard

23. “Aphorisms are bad for novels. They stick in the reader’s teeth.”

— Anatole Broyard

24. “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

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

— Anatole Broyard

26. “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

27. “There are few things more subtly distressing than an inappropriate gift from someone close to you.”

— Anatole Broyard

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

— Anatole Broyard

29. “The contents of someone’s bookcase are part of his history, like an ancestral portrait.”

— Anatole Broyard

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

— Anatole Broyard

31. “Ruefulness is one of the classical tones of American fiction. It fosters a native, deglamorized form of anxiety.”

— Anatole Broyard