Top 60 Quotes & Sayings by Anita Brookner

Existentialism is about being a saint without God; being your own hero, without all the sanction and support of religion or society.

All good fortune is a gift of the gods, and you don't win the favor of the ancient gods by being good, but by being bold.

I've never got on very well with Jane Austen.

Good women always think it is their fault when someone else is being offensive. Bad women never take the blame for anything.

There are moments when you feel free, moments when you have energy, moments when you have hope, but you can't rely on any of these things to see you through. Circumstances do that.

I'm a middle-class, middle-brow novelist. And that's it. It amuses me.

A man of such obvious and exemplary charm must be a liar.

Time misspent in youth is sometimes all the freedom one ever has.

You never know what you will learn till you start writing. Then you discover truths you never knew existed.

Life... is not simply a series of exciting new ventures. The future is not always a whole new ball game. There tends to be unfinished business. One trails all sorts of things around with one, things that simply won't be got rid of.

In real life, of course, it is the hare that wins. Every time. Look around you.

I was brought up to look after my parents. My family were Polish Jews, and we lived with my grandmother, with uncles and aunts and cousins all around, and I thought everybody lived like that.

You can never betray the people who are dead, so you go on being a public Jew; the dead can't answer slurs, but I'm here. I would love to think that Jesus wants me for a sunbeam, but he doesn't.

I never learnt Hebrew because my health was fragile, and it was thought that learning Hebrew would be an added burden. I regret it, because I would like to be able to join in fully. Not that I am a believer, but I would like to be.

Accountability in friendship is the equivalent of love without strategy.

I was a teacher most of my life, which I loved. I had a very happy working life, and when I retired, I thought I must do something, and I've always read a lot of fiction - you learn so much from fiction. My sentimental education came mostly from fiction, I should say, so I thought I'd try.

A complete woman is probably not a very admirable creature. She is manipulative, uses other people to get her own way, and works within whatever system she is in.

It is my contention that Aesop was writing for the tortoise market. hares have no time to read.

In real life, it is the hare who wins. Every time. Look around you. And in any case it is my contention that Aesop was writing for the tortoise market. Hares have no time to read. They are too busy winning the game.

Like many rich men, he thought in anecdotes; like many simple women, she thought in terms of biography.

Old men should have more care to end life well than to live long.

Real love is a pilgrimage. It happens when there is no strategy, but it is very rare because most people are strategists.

The essence of romantic love is that wonderful beginning, after which sadness and impossibility may become the rule.

It will be a pity if women in the more conventional mould are to be phased out, for there will never be anyone to go home to.

What is interesting about self-analysis is that it leads nowhere - it is an art form in itself.

The lessons taught in great books are misleading. The commerce in life is rarely so simple and never so just.

If I were happy, married with six children, I wouldn't be writing. And I doubt if I should want to.

Great writers are the saints for the godless.

Writing novels preserves you in a state of innocence - a lot passes you by - simply because your attention is otherwise diverted.

I'm not very popular, because they're bleak and they're mournful and all the rest of it and I get censorious reviews. But I'm only writing fiction. I'm not making munitions, so I think it's acceptable.

No blame should attach to telling the truth. But it does, it does.

You have no idea how promising the world begins to look once you have decided to have it all for yourself. And how much healthier your decisions are once they become entirely selfish.

People say that I am always serious and depressing, but it seems to me that the English are never serious - they are flippant, complacent, ineffable, but never serious, which is sometimes maddening.

That sun, that light had faded, and she had faded with them. Now she was as grey as the season itself.

You are wrong if you think you cannot live without love. I cannot live without it. I do not mean that I go into a decline, develop odd symptoms, became a caricature. I mean that I cannot live well without it. I cannot think or act or speak or write or even dream with any kind of energy in the absence of love. I feel excluded from the living world. I become cold, fish-like, immobile. I implode.

Problems of human behavior still continue to baffle us, but at least in the Library we have them properly filed.

Writing has freed me from the despair of living.

Fiction is the great repository of the moral sense. The wicked get punished.

A man can go from being a lover to being a stranger in three moves flat but a woman under the guise of friendship will engage in acts of duplicity which come to light very much later. There are different species of self-justification.

I am not a romantic. I am a domestic animal. I do not sigh and yearn for extravagant displays of passion, for the grand affair, the world well lost for love. I know all that, and know that it leaves you lonely. No, what I crave is the simplicity of routine. An evening walk, arm in arm, in fine weather. A game of cards. Time for idle talk. Preparing a meal together.

I think you always feel braver in another language.

Dr Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature.

For once a thing is known, it can never be unknown. It can only be forgotten.

I was brought up among the sort of self-important women who had a husband as one has an alibi.

I need noise and interruptions and irritation: irritation and discomfort are a great starter. The loneliness of doing it any other way would kill me.

And without understanding, could each properly love the other?

The self-fulfilled woman is far from reality.

Romanticism is not just a mode; it literally eats into every life. Women will never get rid of just waiting for the right man.

You can never betray the people who are dead.

Satire is dependent on strong beliefs, and on strong beliefs wounded.

Always let them think of you as singing and dancing.

The evening passes somehow; I watch television with Nancy, or I write. It is difficult, not having a family, and it is difficult to explain. I always go to bed early. And I am always ready for Monday morning, that time that other people dread.

Life is a pilgrimage and if you don't play by the rules you don't find the Road to Damascus, you find the Crown of Thorns.

When you make a break for freedom you don't necessarily find company on the way.

One loses the capacity to grieve as a child grieves, or to rage as a child rages: hotly, despairingly, with tears of passion. One grows up, one becomes civilized, one learns one's manners, and consequently can no longer manage these two functions - sorrow and anger - adequately.

To remain pure, a novel has to cast a moral puzzle. Anything else is mere negotiation.

I suppose what one wants really is ideal company and books are ideal company.

Death is only a small interruption.

It is best to marry for purely selfish reasons.

I am 46, and have been for some time past.