60 Quotes by 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.

For years they have been using the role of 'sex object' as a cover while they spied out the land.

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.

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

A whole generation of writers dined out on the dialectic between original cultures and their culture by "progress.

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

We don't simply read books. We become them.

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.

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