Anita Brookner
Anita Brookner
Anita Brookner, CBEwas a British award-winning novelist and art historian. She was Slade Professor of Fine Art at the University of Cambridge from 1967 to 1968 and was the first woman to hold this visiting professorship. She was awarded the 1984 Man Booker Prize for her novel Hotel du Lac...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionHistorian
Date of Birth16 July 1938
library problem behavior
Problems of human behavior still continue to baffle us, but at least in the Library we have them properly filed.
interruptions
Death is only a small interruption.
loneliness irritation needs
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.
wicked fiction moral
Fiction is the great repository of the moral sense. The wicked get punished.
new-ventures games unfinished-business
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.
understanding
And without understanding, could each properly love the other?
I'm a middle-class, middle-brow novelist. And that's it. It amuses me.
bleak
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.
english-historian
In real life, of course, it is the hare that wins. Every time. Look around you.
added health hebrew join learning learnt
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.
english-historian life men
Old men should have more care to end life well than to live long.
aunts brought everybody family lived polish uncles
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.