Quotes About Iris Murdoch

Rosina had the fierce charm of the rather nasty girl in the fairy-tale who fails to get the prince, but is more interesting than the girl who does, and has better lines too.

What a bore for you," I said, and I smiled to myself. 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.

Art both expresses and gratifies the lowest part of the soul, and feeds and enlivens base emotions which ought to be left to wither.

By 1993 Murdoch was becoming reluctant to engage in public activities and dreaded giving interviews. These late letters increasingly evidence the language difficulties and amnesia that, in retrospect, suggest the progression of Alzheimer's disease, although the condition remained undiagnosed until 1997.

Her short straight oily hair, a lustrous black, sat like a cropped wig about her pale rather waxen Jewish face.

She's also in love with the 'Polish Rider'. Who's he? A picture by Rembrandt.

He had trimmed his moustache into a Hitlerian toothbrush.

She said she sometimes worked as an usherette in the cinema, and she had seemed to him like a nymph of the cinema age, a sybil of the cavern of illusory love.

In October 2014 files released from the National Archives revealed that MI5 'opened personal files on the popular historian A. J. P. Taylor, the writer Iris Murdoch and the moral philosopher Mary Warnock after they and [Christopher] Hill signed a letter supporting a march against the nuclear bomb in 1959'.

One reward of living in hell is a certain kind of courage. I do not fear anything, certainly not morality, or your foul fantasies either.

I know time doesn't heal. That's the silliest idea of all.

Do you think she'll change? Hope nothing. Is there a cure? Only art. Or more love. I should die of more love.

Iris Murdoch did influence my early novels very much, and influence is never entirely good.

Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one's luck.