Anita Brookner

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

— Anita Brookner

You have no idea how promising the world begins to look once you have decided to have it all for yourself. And…

— Anita Brookner

I never learnt Hebrew because my health was fragile, and it was thought that learning Hebrew would be an added burden. I…

— 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,…

— Anita Brookner

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

— Anita Brookner

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

— Anita Brookner

I am not a romantic. I am a domestic animal. I do not sigh and yearn for extravagant displays of passion, for…

— Anita Brookner

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

— Anita Brookner

“It seemed to me that I, rather than he, had brought this about, and my despair was extreme. For now that I…

— Anita Brookner

Always let them think of you as singing and dancing.

— Anita Brookner

I was brought up to look after my parents. My family were Polish Jews, and we lived with my grandmother, with uncles…

— Anita Brookner

“We shall none of us ever make love again, she thought, and did not much care. Life had not been too harsh;…

— Anita Brookner

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

— 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

There are moments when you feel free, moments when you have energy, moments when you have hope, but you can't rely on…

— Anita Brookner

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…

— Anita Brookner

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

— Anita Brookner

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

— Anita Brookner

“Old times, sad times. I feel better about them now than I did then.”

— Anita Brookner

Writing has freed me from the despair of living.

— Anita Brookner

“I remember at that time I went to the hairdresser's. I did this regularly, but I remember that visit for two particular…

— Anita Brookner

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

— Anita Brookner

It is best to marry for purely selfish reasons.

— Anita Brookner

“Hartmann had the ideas and Fibich did the worrying: it suited them both perfectly.”

— Anita Brookner

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

— Anita Brookner