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
Food is a profound subject and one, incidentally, about which no writer lies.
The best thing about being God would be making the heads.
Coffee, unless it is very good and made by somebody else, is pretty intolerable at any time.
Every artist is an unhappy lover. And unhappy lovers want to tell their story.
Starting a novel is opening a door on a misty landscape; you can still see very little but you can smell the earth and feel the wind blowing.
We are such inward secret creatures, that inwardness is the most amazing thing about us, even more amazing than our reason.
One of the secrets of a happy life is continuous small treats, and if some of these can be inexpensive and quickly procured so much the better.
Only love has clear vision. Hatred has cloudy vision. When we hate we know not what we do.
How rarely can happiness be really innocent and not triumphant, not an insult to the deprived.
I am not famous for anything in particular. I am just famous.
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.
Freedom may be a value in politics, but it is not a value in morals.
Intense mutual erotic love, love which involves with the flesh all the most refined sexual being of the spirit, which reveals and perhaps even ex nihilo creates spirit as sex, is comparatively rare in this inconvenient world.
A death is the most terrible of facts.