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
Iris Murdoch quotes about
The best thing about being God would be making the heads.
All our failures are ultimately failures in love.
Language is a machine for making falsehoods.
He was a sociologist; he had got into an intellectual muddle early on in life and never managed to get out.
You cannot have both truth and what you call civilisation.
Actors are cave dwellers in a rich darkness which they love and hate.
I am not famous for anything in particular. I am just famous.
Probably no adult misery can be compared with a child's despair.
confession ran in the family.
What makes you imagine ... that anything of importance can be taught in a school?
Remember that the secret of all learning is patience and that curiosity is not the same thing as a thirst for knowledge.
evil soon makes tools out of those who don't hate it.
I live, I live, with an absolutely continuous sense of failure. I am always defeated, always. Every book is the wreck of a perfect idea. The years pass and one has only one life. If one has a thing at all one must do it and keep on and on and on trying to do it better.
We must live by the light of our own self-satisfaction, through that secret vital busy inwardness which is even more remarkable than our reason.