“Even if readers claim that they 'take it all with a grain of salt', they do not really. They yearn to believe,… — Iris Murdoch Copy Share Image
“T. S. Eliot and Jean-Paul Sartre, dissimilar enough as thinkers, both tend to undervalue prose and to deny it any imaginative function.… — Iris Murdoch Copy Share Image
Food is a profound subject and one, incidentally, about which no writer lies. — Iris Murdoch Copy Share Image
“It is necessary to write, that much is clear, and to write in a way quite unlike any way which I have… — Iris Murdoch Copy Share Image
Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one's luck. — Iris Murdoch Copy Share Image
Good writing is full of surprises and novelties, moving in a direction you don't expect. — Iris Murdoch Copy Share Image
Reading and writing and the preservation of language and its forms and the kind of eloquence and the kind of beauty which… — Iris Murdoch Copy Share Image
any writer is inevitably going to work with his own anxieties and desires. If the book is any good it has got… — Iris Murdoch Copy Share Image
“I rather liked him.I asked him to come and see us.' ‘Oh Christ !’ ‘But, Bradley, you mustn’t reject people,you musn't just… — Iris Murdoch Copy Share Image
Falling out of love is chiefly a matter of forgetting how charming someone is. — Iris Murdoch Copy Share Image
One doesn't have to get anywhere in a marriage. It's not a public conveyance. — Iris Murdoch Copy Share Image
“I think being a woman is like being Irish... Everyone says you're important and nice, but you take second place all the time.” — Iris Murdoch Copy Share Image
Art is the final cunning of the human soul which would rather do anything than face the gods. — Iris Murdoch Copy Share Image
emotions really exist at the bottom of the personality or at the top. in the middle they are acted. this is why all the… — Iris Murdoch Copy Share Image
I have used the word "attention," which I borrow from Simone Weil, to express the idea of a just and loving gaze directed upon… — Iris Murdoch Copy Share Image
Starting a novel is opening a door on a misty landscape; you can still see very little but you can smell the earth and… — Iris Murdoch Copy Share Image
Art and morality are, with certain provisos…one. Their essence is the same. The essence of both of them is love. Love is the perception… — Iris Murdoch Copy Share Image
being homosexual doesn't determine a man's whole character any more than being heterosexual does. — Iris Murdoch Copy Share Image
All artists dream of a silence which they must enter, as some creatures return to the sea to spawn. — Iris Murdoch Copy Share Image
“Oh if only I could take my mother away and never know of these things again. But it was impossible, the machine would go… — Iris Murdoch Copy Share Image
