Brooks Atkinson Quotes

It seems not to have been written. It is the quintessence of life. It is the basic truth.

In the ideal sense nothing is uninteresting; there are only uninterested people.

Writing is not an end in itself but life transmuted into radiance.

It takes most men five years to recover from a college education, and to learn that poetry is as vital to thinking as knowledge.

Every man with an idea has at least two or three followers.

Everyone in daily life carries such a heavy mixed burden on his own conscience that he is reluctant to penalize those who have been caught.

Don't be condescending to unskilled labor. Try it for a half a day first.

Real art is illumination, it adds stature to life.

Life is seldom as unendurable as, to judge by the facts, it logically ought to be.

New Yorkers are inclined to assume it will never rain, and certainly not on New Yorkers.

Good plays drive bad playgoers crazy.

After each war there is a little less democracy to save.

The perfect bureaucrat everywhere is the man who manages to make no decisions and escape all responsibility.

There is no joy so great as that of reporting that a good play has come to town.

Nobody is fully alive who cannot apply to art as much discrimination and appreciation as he applies to the work by which he earns his living.

The most fatal illusion is the settled point of view. Since life is growth and motion, a fixed point of view kills anybody who has one.

We tolerate differences of opinion in people who are familiar to us. But differences of opinion in people we do not know sound like heresy or plots.

I have no objections to churches so long as they do not interfere with God's work.

The evil that men do lives on the front pages of greedy newspapers, but the good is oft interred apathetically inside.

Land was created to provide a place for boats to visit.

The virtue of the camera is not the power it has to transform the photographer into an artist, but the impulse it gives him to keep on looking.

Drop the last year into the silent limbo of the past. Let it go, for it was imperfect, and thank God that it can go.

There should be a dash of the amateur in criticism. For the amateur is a man of enthusiasm who has not settled down and is not habit bound.