Iris Murdoch - The Black Prince (1973)

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

Iris Murdoch
Man's creative struggle, his search for wisdom and truth, is a love story.

Iris Murdoch
All art is the struggle to be, in a particular sort of way, virtuous.

Iris Murdoch
I live, I live, with an absolutely continuous sense of failure. I am always defeated, always. Every book is the wreck of a perfect idea. The years pass and one has only one life. If one has a thing at all one must do it and keep on and on and on trying to do it better.

Iris Murdoch
Time can divorce us from the reality of people, it can separate us from people and turn them into ghosts. Or rather it is we who turn them into ghosts or demons. Some kinds of fruitless preoccupations with the past can create such simulacra, and they can exercise power, like those heroes at Troy fighting for a phantom Helen.

Iris Murdoch
All artists dream of a silence which they must enter, as some creatures return to the sea to spawn.

Iris Murdoch
A letter is a barrier, a reprieve, a charm against the world, an almost infallible method of acting at a distance.

Iris Murdoch
There is nothing like the bootless solitude of those who are caged together.

Iris Murdoch
For most of us the space between 'dreaming on things to come' and 'it is too late, it is all over' is too tiny to enter.

Iris Murdoch
I can browse indefinitely in a stationer's shop, indeed there is hardly anything in a good stationer's which I do not like and want.

Iris Murdoch
We defend ourselves with descriptions and tame the world by generalizing.

Iris Murdoch
The human soul is not framed for continued proximity, and the result of this enforced neighbourhood is often an appalling loneliness for which the rules of the game forbid assuagement.

Iris Murdoch
Upon the demon-ridden pilgrimage of human life, what next I wonder.

Iris Murdoch
There is no triumph of good, and if there were it would not be a triumph of good.

Iris Murdoch
That's how vile i am! I live Ireland, I breathe Ireland, and Christ how I loathe it, I wish I were a bloody Scot, that's how bloody awful it is being Irish!

Iris Murdoch
Trains induce such terrible anxiety. They image the possibility of total and irrevocable failure. They are also dirty, rackety, packed with strangers, an object lesson in the foul contingency of life: the talkative fellow-traveller, the possibility of children.

Iris Murdoch
People who boast of happy marriages are, I submit, usually self-deceivers, if not actually liars.

Iris Murdoch
I feel half faded away like some figure in the background of an old picture.

Iris Murdoch
What a test that is: more than devotion, admiration, passion. If you long and long for someone's company you love them.

Iris Murdoch
Jealousy is the most dreadfully involuntary of all sins. It is at once one of the ugliest and one of the most pardonable.

Iris Murdoch
Then I felt too that I might take this opportunity to tie up a few loose ends, only of course loose ends can never be properly tied, one is always producing new ones. Time, like the sea, unties all knots. Judgements on people are never final, they emerge from summings up which at once suggest the need of a reconsideration. Human arrangements are nothing but loose ends and hazy reckoning, whatever art may otherwise pretend in order to console us.

Iris Murdoch
Every artist is an unhappy lover. And unhappy lovers want to tell their story.

Iris Murdoch
There is a natural tribal hostility between the married and the unmarried. I cannot stand the shows so often quite instinctively put on by married people to insinuate that they are not only more fortunate but in some way more moral than you are.

Iris Murdoch
The most potent and sacred command which can be laid upon any artist is the command: wait.

Iris Murdoch
Coffee, unless it is very good and made by somebody else, is pretty intolerable at any time.

Iris Murdoch
Of course reading and thinking are important but, my God, food is important too.

Iris Murdoch
The absolute yearning of one human body for another particular body and its indifference to substitutes is one of life's major mysteries.

Iris Murdoch
Art is not cozy and it is not mocked. Art tells the only truth that ultimately matters. It is the light by which human things can be mended. And after art there is, let me assure you all, nothing.

Iris Murdoch
All art deals with the absurd and aims at the simple. Good art speaks truth, indeed is truth, perhaps the only truth.

Iris Murdoch
Of course men play roles, but women play roles too, blanker ones. They have, in the play of life, fewer good lines.

Iris Murdoch