A biography for Anita Brooknerhasn’t been written yet.
“If I were happy, married with six children, I wouldn't be writing. And I doubt if I should want to.”
“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'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.”
“Literature for me was a magnificent destiny for which I was not yet fully prepared. 76”
“Accountability in friendship is the equivalent of love without strategy.”
“Women share their sadness, thought Edith. Their joy they like to show off to one another. Victory, triumph over the odds, calls for an audience. And that air of bustle and exigence sometimes affected by the sexually loquacious - that is for the benefit of other women. No solidarity then.”
“Of course, the spectacle of two people's happiness is always something of a magnet for the unclaimed.”
“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.”
“Boundaries keep people out mine served only to keep me in.”
“Old men should have more care to end life well than to live long.”
“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.”
“What is interesting about self-analysis is that it leads nowhere - it is an art form in itself.”
“I've never got on very well with Jane Austen.”
“A man of such obvious and exemplary charm must be a liar.”
“I'm a middle-class, middle-brow novelist. And that's it. It amuses me.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Great writers are the saints for the godless.”
“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.”
“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.”