Iris Murdoch
Iris Murdoch
Dame Jean Iris Murdoch DBEwas an Irish novelist and philosopher, best known for her novels about good and evil, sexual relationships, morality, and the power of the unconscious. Her first published novel, Under the Net, was selected in 1998 as one of Modern Library's 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. In 1987, she was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire. Her books include The Bell, A Severed Head, The Red and the Green,...
NationalityIrish
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth15 July 1919
CountryIreland
The most potent and sacred command which can be laid upon any artist is the command: wait.
Real worship involves waiting.
People who boast of happy marriages are, I submit, usually self-deceivers, if not actually liars.
All art deals with the absurd and aims at the simple. Good art speaks truth, indeed is truth, perhaps the only truth.
There is no triumph of good, and if there were it would not be a triumph of good.
Art and psychoanalysis give shape and meaning to life and that is why we adore them, but life as it is lived has no shape and meaning ...
A letter is a barrier, a reprieve, a charm against the world, an almost infallible method of acting at a distance.
The theatre is a tragic place, full of endings and partings and heartbreak.
... he felt himself to be one of them, who can live neither in the world nor out of it. They are a kind of sick people, whose desire for God makes them unsatisfactory citizens of an ordinary life, but whose strength or temperament fails them to surrender the world completely; and present-day society, with its hurried pace and its mechanical and technical structure, offers no home to these unhappy souls.
To be a complete victim may be another source of power.
They are universal places, like churches, hallowed meeting places of all mankind.
... where does one person end and another person begin?
The very madness of the scheme protects it.
Jealousy comes from self-love rather than from true love.