Anita Brookner

Anita Brookner is an English novelist and art historian. She was educated at James Allen's Girls' School. She received a BA in History from King's College London in 1949 and a doctorate in Art History from the Courtauld Institute of Art in 1953. In 1967 she became the first woman to hold the Slade professorship at Cambridge University. She was promoted to Reader at the Courtauld Institute of Art in 1977, where she worked until her retirement in 1988. Brookner was made a CBE in 1990. She is a Fellow of New Hall, Cambridge. Brookner published her first novel, A Start In Life, in 1981 at the age of 53. Since then she has published approximately a novel every year. Her fourth book, Hotel du Lac, published in 1984, won the Booker Prize.
Found 14 thoughts of Anita Brookner

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

Anita Brookner

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

Anita Brookner

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

Anita Brookner

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

Anita Brookner

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

Anita Brookner

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.

Anita Brookner

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

Anita Brookner

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

Anita Brookner

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

Anita Brookner

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.

Anita Brookner

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

Anita Brookner

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.

Anita Brookner

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

Anita Brookner

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.

Anita Brookner