150 Quotes by Muriel Spark

If I had my life to live over again, I would form the habit of nightly composing myself to thoughts of death. I would practice, as it were, the remembrance of death. There is not another practice which so intensifies life. Death, when it approaches, ought not to take one by surprise. It should be part of the full expectancy of life.

you're quite wrong there, Collie. One does miss sex. The body has a life of it's own. We do miss what we haven't had, you and I. Biologically. Ask Sigmund Freud. It is revealed in dreams. The absent touch of warm limbs at night, the absent

It's only possible to betray where loyalty is due

it never really occurred to her that literary men, if they like women at all, do not want literary women but girls.

I think she’s too ignorant to be a witch.

Sandwiches,' she said, 'like diamonds, are forever.

You do not know the madness of scholarly curiosity, Mr Webster. To be interested, and at the same time disinterested…

Connie's other job was proof-editing which she did very badly. Transferring the author's corrections to a clean sheet of proofs was something Connie was unable to do without missing an average of three corrections a page, or transcribing newly inserted material all wrong... she put angry authors' letters about the mutilation of their books under the cushion of her chair to deal with later

This deadly body of mine can dance, too.