Quotes from Muriel Spark

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

If I had my life to live over again, I would form the habit of nightly composing myself to thoughts of death. I would practice, as it were, the remembrance of death. There is not another practice which so intensifies life. Death, when it approaches, ought not to take one by surprise. It should be part of the full expectancy of life.

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.

Being in love is something like poetry. Certainly, you can analyze and expound its various senses and intentions, but there is always something left over, mysteriously hovering between music and meaning.

I'm old-fashioned beyond my years.

Beware the ire of the calm.

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. To Miss Mackay it is a putting in of something that is not there, and that is not what I call education, I call it intrusion, from the Latin root prefix in meaning in and the stem trudo, I thrust.

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.

Being over seventy is like being engaged in a war. All our friends are going or gone and we survive amongst the dead and dying as on a battlefield.

My novel] took up the sweetest part of my mind and the rarest part of my imagination; it was like being in love and better. All day long when I was busy [...], I had my unfinished novel personified almost as a secret companion and accomplice following me like a shadow wherever I went, whatever I did.

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;...

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

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.

It is not because we are rats that we tend to abandon people who are down, it is because we are embarrassed.

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

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

Phrases like 'the team spirit' are always employed to cut across individualism, love and personal loyalties.

It's a whydunnit in q-sharp major and it has a message: never talk to the sort of girls that you wouldn't leave lying about in your drawing-room for the servants to pick up.