Brooks Atkinson Quotes (24 Quotes)


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

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

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

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

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


    The cocktail party . . . is a device either for getting rid of social obligations hurriedly en masse or for making overtures toward more serious social relationships, as in the etiquette of whoring.

    When Mr. Wilbur calls his play 'Halfway to Hell,' he underestimates the distance.

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

    The only important thing a writer needs is a subject. What the reader hungers after is not accomplished craftsmanship nor even correct grammar but a frank report of the things a writer has done, seen, and thought. None of these can be learned in the library or classroom. They have to be learned in the unsheltered world of living where me get slivers of the truth beaten into their heads.

    We cheerfully assume that in some mystic way love conquers all, that good outweighs evil in the just balances of the universe and at the 11th hour something gloriously triumphant will prevent the worst before it happens.

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

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

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

    In the 1920s dramatists attacked their subjects as if the inequities could be resolved. Some of the traditional optimism of America lurked behind most of the early plays. But not now. There is no conviction now that the problem will be solved.

    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.

    Ethel Waters, the flaming tower of dusky regality, who knows how to make a song stand on tiptoe.

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


    It seems to me that the thing that makes the theater worthwhile is the fact that it attracts so many people with ideas who are constantly trying to share them with the public. Real art is illumination. It gives a man an idea he never had before or lights up ideas that were formless or only lurking in the shadows of his mind. It adds stature to life.

    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.

    As thought it is a contribution to public knowledge. As drama it is vivid and bold.

    People everywhere enjoy believing things that they know are not true. It spares them the ordeal of thinking for themselves and taking responsibility for what they know.

    In every age 'the good old days' were a myth. No one ever thought they were good at the time. For every age has consisted of crises that seemed intolerable to the people who lived through them.

    Nothing a man writes can please him as profoundly as something he does with his back, shoulders and hands. For writing is an artificial activity. It is a lonely and private substitute for conversation.


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