Muriel Spark Quotes

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

She wasn't a person to whom things happen. She did all the happenings.

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.

Ridicule is the only honorable weapon we have left.

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

Beware the ire of the calm.

From my experience of life I believe my personal motto should be: 'Beware of any man bringing flowers.

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

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.

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

You look for one thing and you find another.

To me education is a leading out of what is already there in the pupil's soul.

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.

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

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

Fiction to me is a kind of parable. You have got to make up your mind it's not true. Some kind of truth emerges from it, but it's not fact.

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

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.

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.

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

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

The sacrifice of pleasures is of course itself a pleasure.

I often wonder if we were all characters in one of God's dreams.

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

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.