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.

It is one of the secrets of Nature in its mood of mockery that fine weather lays heavier weight on the mind and hearts of the depressed and the inwardly tormented than does a really bad day with dark rain sniveling continuously and sympathetically from a dirty sky.

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.

If I had my life over again I should form the habit of nightly composing myself to thoughts of death. I would practise, as it were, the remembrance of death. There is no other 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. Without an ever-present sense of death life is insipid.

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.

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

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

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

Ridicule is the only honorable weapon we have left.

The sacrifice of pleasures is of course itself a pleasure.

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

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

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

sooner or later I do what I want to do.

Beware of men bearing flowers.

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.

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

Frankness is usually a euphemism for rudeness.

The letters of famous people can be placed into two categories: there is the type of letter which becomes itself a valuable contribution to literature through its wit, style or wisdom; another kind is that whose main importance lies in the provision of a background to their author's life. Especially in the correspondence of great writers and poets, these two factors are very often combined.

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.

The words of the double-tongued are as if they were harmless, but they reach even to the inner part of the bowels. Praise be to the Lord, who distinguishes our cause and delivers us from the unjust and deceitful man.

New York, home of the vivisectors of the mind, and of the mentally vivisected still to be reassembled, of those who live intact, habitually wondering about their states of sanity, and home of those whose minds have been dead, bearing the scars of resurrection.

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

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.

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

One should only see a psychiatrist out of boredom.

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.

Goodness, Truth and Beauty come first

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

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

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

[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.

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

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 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.

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.

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

we have invented sex guilt to take our minds off the real thing.

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

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

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

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

I'm old-fashioned beyond my years.