Muriel Spark Quotes

Give me a girl at an impressionable age and she is mine for life.

I see no reason to keep silent about my enjoyment of the sound of my own voice as I work.

The true novelist is one who understands the work as a continuous poem, is a myth-maker, and the wonder of the art resides in the endless different ways of telling a story.

To me education is a leading out of what is already there in the pupil's soul.

She wasn't a person to whom things happen. She did all the happenings.

Parents learn a lot from their children about coping with life.

It is impossible to persuade a man who does not disagree, but smiles.

If you're going to do a thing, you should do it thoroughly. If you're going to be a Christian, you may as well be a Catholic.

If you want to concentrate deeply on some problem, and especially some piece of writing or paper-work, you should acquire a cat . . .

The sacrifice of pleasures is of course itself a pleasure.

Ridicule is the only honorable weapon we have left.

A rebellion against a tyrant is only immoral when it hasn't got a chance.

It is well, when in difficulties, to say never a word, neither black nor white. Speech is silver but silence is golden.

Let us run up debts. One is nobody without debts.

Contradictions in human character are one of its most consistent notes.

Beware of men bearing flowers.

sooner or later I do what I want to do.

You look for one thing and you find another.

One's prime is elusive. You little girls, when you grow up, must be on the alert to recognize your prime at whatever time of your life it may occur. You must then live it to the full.

Frankness is usually a euphemism for rudeness.

everything happens to an artist; time is always redeemed, nothing is lost and wonders never cease.

It is impossible to repent of love. The sin of love does not exist.

Death, when it approaches, ought not to take one by surprise. It should be part of the full expectancy of life. Without an ever-present sense of death life is insipid.

Looking forward to going home, I was necessarily looking backward.

When a noble life has prepared old age, it is not decline that it reveals, but the first days of immortality.

Neurotics are awfully quick to notice other people's mentalities.

If you choose the sort of life which has no conventional pattern you have to try to make an art of it, or it is a mess.

One should only see a psychiatrist out of boredom.

I have a great desire to make people smile - not laugh. Laughter is too aggressive. People bare their teeth.

Interviews can be stimulating. It depends on the intelligence of the interviewer.

For those who like that sort of thing," said Miss Brodie in her best Edinburgh voice, "That is the sort of thing they like.

Allow me, in conclusion, to congratulate you warmly upon your sexual intercourse, as well as your singing.

Goodness, Truth and Beauty come first

Art and religion first; then philosophy; lastly science. That is the order of the great subjects of life, that's their order of importance.

The word "education" comes from the root e from ex, out, and duco, I lead. It means a leading out. To me education is a leading out of what is already there in the pupil's soul.

The sparkle and morning-freshness of the shop, and the butter-conjuring girl, formed a mind-picture which accompanied the whole of my youth.(about the Buttercup Dairy)

Try as i do, i can't recall her surname. Indeed, her very abstractedness and insubstantial personality seemed to say 'forget me'; she seemed to live in parenthesis.

it never really occurred to her that literary men, if they like women at all, do not want literary women but girls.

So great was the noise during the day that I used to lie awake at night listening to silence.

How wonderful it feels to be an artist and a woman in the twentieth century.

I never trust the airlines from those countries where the pilots believe in the afterlife. You are safer when they don't.

I often wonder if we were all characters in one of God's dreams.

Jealousy ... is an affliction of the spirit which, unlike some sins of the flesh, gives no one any pleasure.

I am a hoarder of two things: documents and trusted friends.

I was just as anxious to prevent injustice as to cause justice.

I'm old-fashioned beyond my years.

Final perseverance is the doctrine that wins the eternal victory in small things as in great

Beware the ire of the calm.

Every communist has a fascist frown, every fascist a communist smile.

Fiction to me is a kind of parable. You have got to make up your mind it's not true. Some kind of truth emerges from it, but it's not fact.