Iris Murdoch was born 15 July 1919, and died 8 February 1999.
Quotes
- Art is the final cunning of the human soul which would rather do anything than face the gods.
- Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real.
- The most essential and fundamental aspect of culture is the study of literature, since this is an education in how to picture and understand human situations.
- Every book is the wreck of a perfect idea.
- People have obsessions and fears and passions which they don’t admit to. I think every character is interesting and has extremes. It’s the novelist’s privilege to see how odd everyone is.
- In philosophy if you aren’t moving at a snail’s pace you aren’t moving at all.
- Happiness is a matter of one’s most ordinary and everyday mode of consciousness being busy and lively and unconcerned with self.
- Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one’s luck.
- Perhaps when distant people on other planets pick up some wave-length of ours all they hear is a continuous scream.
- For most of us, for almost all of us, truth can be attained, if at all, only in silence. It is in silence that the human spirit touches the divine.
- Starting a novel is opening a door on a misty landscape; you can still see very little but you can smell the earth and feel the wind blowing.
- Every artist is an unhappy lover. And unhappy lovers want to tell their story.
Must-Read: 5 Bits Of Writing Advice From Iris Murdoch
Iris Murdoch was an Irish-born British author and philosopher. Her first published novel, Under The Net, was selected in 1998 as one of Modern Library’s 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. She won the Booker Prize for The Sea, The Sea. In 2008, The Times ranked Murdoch twelfth on a list of ‘The 50 greatest British writers since 1945’.
Source for an image of the author
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