Iris Murdoch Quotes

Every artist is an unhappy lover.

A long marriage is very unifying, even if it's not ideal, and those old structures must be respected.

That's how vile i am! I live Ireland, I breathe Ireland, and Christ how I loathe it, I wish I were a bloody Scot, that's how bloody awful it is being Irish!

The most potent and sacred command which can be laid upon any artist is the command: wait.

One doesn't have to get anywhere in a marriage. It's not a public conveyance.

One of the secrets of a happy life is continuous small treats, and if some of these can be inexpensive and quickly procured so much the better.

Language is a machine for making falsehoods.

We are such inward secret creatures, that inwardness is the most amazing thing about us, even more amazing than our reason.

Real worship involves waiting.

The sending of a letter constitutes a magical grasp upon the future.

evil soon makes tools out of those who don't hate it.

Good writing is full of surprises and novelties, moving in a direction you don't expect.

We must live by the light of our own self-satisfaction, through that secret vital busy inwardness which is even more remarkable than our reason.

There is a gulf fixed between those who can sleep and those who cannot. It is one of the greatest divisions of the human race.

emotions really exist at the bottom of the personality or at the top. in the middle they are acted. this is why all the world is a stage.

Nothing is more maddening than being questioned by the object of one's interest about the object of hers, should that object not be you.

People who boast of happy marriages are, I submit, usually self-deceivers, if not actually liars.

Those who hope, by retiring from the world, to earn a holiday from human frailty, in themselves and others, are usually disappointed.

Art is brief. (Not in a temporal sense.) [...] Words are for concealment. Art is concealment.

You cannot have both truth and what you call civilisation.

Freedom is not choosing; that is merely the move that we make when all is already lost. Freedom is knowing and understanding and respecting things quite other than ourselves.

... when caught unawares I usually tell the truth, and what's duller than that?

Socrates wrote nothing. Christ wrote nothing.

... a less than perfect meddling in the spiritual world can breed monsters for other people.

Art is not cozy and it is not mocked. Art tells the only truth that ultimately matters. It is the light by which human things can be mended. And after art there is, let me assure you all, nothing.

Love can't always do work. Sometimes it just has to look into the darkness.

for most of us the space between 'dreaming on things to come' and 'it is too late, it is all over' is too tiny to enter.

I think philosophy is extremely good training for anyone who wants to do anything. Although that is an idea which people may speak scornfully of now, I think it does teach one to

A letter is a barrier, a reprieve, a charm against the world, an almost infallible method of acting at a distance.

any writer is inevitably going to work with his own anxieties and desires. If the book is any good it has got to have in it the fire of a personal unconscious mind.

I am not famous for anything in particular. I am just famous.

A death is the most terrible of facts.

The notion that one can liberate another soul from captivity is an illusion of the very young.

Probably no adult misery can be compared with a child's despair.

Art is a kind of artificial memory and the pain which attends all serious art is a sense of that factitiousness.

Of course men play roles, but women play roles too, blanker ones. They have, in the play of life, fewer good lines.

Hegel says that Truth is a great word and the thing is greater still. With Dave we never seemed to get past the word.

How rarely can happiness be really innocent and not triumphant, not an insult to the deprived.

What makes you imagine ... that anything of importance can be taught in a school?

What a test that is: more than devotion, admiration, passion. If you long and long for someone’s company you love them.

The most interesting things are always happening behind one.

being homosexual doesn't determine a man's whole character any more than being heterosexual does.

I see myself as Rhoda, not Mary Tyler Moore.

There is no triumph of good, and if there were it would not be a triumph of good.

until I have been able to bury my head so deep in dear London that I can forget that I have ever been away I am inconsolable.

Actors are cave dwellers in a rich darkness which they love and hate.

to be understood is not a human right. Even to understand oneself is not a human right.

Food is a profound subject and one, incidentally, about which no writer lies.

Daytime sleep is a cursed slumber from which one wakes in despair.

To be a complete victim may be another source of power.