1,162 Quotes by Iris Murdoch

I must admit that I am in a state of utter wretchedness and have been for a long time. I didn’t know that such extreme unhappiness could continue for so long.

I know girls aren’t supposed to tell, but I’ve got to tell – just in case you should fail to love me because you never knew how much I loved you. I want not to have to say later – I wish I’d told him.

I was not, except in some very broken-down sense of that ambiguous term, a love child. I was a word child.

However life, unlike art, has an irritating way of bumping and limping on, undoing conversions, casting doubt on solutions, and generally illustrating the impossibility of living happily or virtuously ever after.

But, and especially with Linda’s help, he had decided that, like most other people, he was not made for reality.

People have obsessions and fears and passions which they don’t admit to. I think every character is interesting and has extremes. It’s the novelist privilege to see how odd everyone is.

We may love our chains and our stripes too.

I accused Hartley of being a ‘fantasist’, or perhaps that was Titus’s word, but what a ‘fantasist’ I have been myself. I was the dreamer, I the magician. How much, I see as I look back, I read into it all, reading my own dream text and not looking at the reality. Hartley had been right when she said of our love that it was not part of the real world. It had no place.

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