60 Quotes by Anatole Broyard

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

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

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

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

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.

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.