Muriel Spark Quotes

62 Sourced Quotes

Parents learn a lot from their children about coping with life. It is possible for parents to be corrupted or improved by their children.

Muriel Spark
Art and religion first; then philosophy; lastly science. That is the order of the great subjects of life, that's their order of importance.

Muriel Spark
One should only see a psychiatrist out of boredom.

Muriel Spark
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.

Muriel Spark
If I had my life over again I should form the habit of nightly composing myself to thoughts of death. I would practice, as it were, the remembrance of death. No other practice so intensifies life. Death, when it approaches, ought not to take one -surprise. It should be part of the full expectancy of life. Without an ever-present sense of death, life is insipid. You might as well live on the whites of eggs.

Muriel Spark
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.

Muriel Spark
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)

Muriel Spark
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...

Muriel Spark
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.

Muriel Spark
Nothing can be more puritanical in application than the virtues.

Muriel Spark
From my experience of life I believe my personal motto should be 'Beware of men bearing flowers.'

Muriel Spark
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.

Muriel Spark
Since the story of my own life is just as much constituted of the secrets of my craft as it is of other events, I might as well remark here that to make a character ring true it needs must be in some way contradictory, somewhere a paradox.

Muriel Spark
Long ago in 1945 all the nice people in England were poor, allowing for exceptions.

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

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

Muriel Spark
These years are still the years of my prime. It is important to recognise the years of one's prime, always remember that.... One's prime is elusive.

Muriel Spark
I am a hoarder of two things: documents and trusted friends.

Muriel Spark
Every communist has a fascist frown, every fascist a communist smile.

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

Muriel Spark
I am putting old heads on your young shoulders…all my pupils are the creme de la creme.

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

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

Muriel Spark
After I became a success, people would ring up and ask me out. I'd say, 'But I'm writing'. And they'd say, 'I see. You're too grand for us now.' And I'd say, 'Actually, I've always been too grand for you.'

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

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

Muriel Spark
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.

Muriel Spark
The one certain way for a woman to hold a man is to leave him for religion.

Muriel Spark
Mabel Pettigrew thought: I can read him like a book. She had not read a book for over forty years, could never concentrate on reading, but this nevertheless was her thought.

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

Muriel Spark