Quotes by Muriel Spark

About Muriel Spark:

Dame Muriel Sarah Spark was a Scottish novelist. In 2008, the Times newspaper named Spark as No. 8 in its list of 'the 50 greatest British writers since 1945'.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

It was a gusty day, and from the windows of Caroline's top-floor flat, only the sky was visible with its little hurrying clouds. It was a day when being indoors was meaningful, wasting an afternoon in superior confidences with a friend before the two...

Muriel Spark

If you want to concentrate deeply on some problem, and especially some piece of writing or paper-work, you should acquire a cat. Alone with the cat in the room where you work ... the cat will invariably get up on your desk and settle placidly under t...

Muriel Spark

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

Muriel Spark

Saving and pinching to get married, you're losing the best time of your life.

Muriel Spark

The sparkle and morning-freshness of the shop, and the butter-conjuring girl, formed a mind-picture which accompanied the whole of my youth.(about the Buttercup Dairy)

Muriel Spark

All my pupils are the creme de la creme. Give me a girl of an impressionable age, and she is mine for life.

Muriel Spark

When a noble life has prepared old age, it is not decline that it reveals, but the first days of immortality.

Muriel Spark

Be on the alert to recognize your prime at whatever time of your life it may occur.

Muriel Spark

Art and religion first; then philosophy; lastly science. That is the order of the great subjects of life, that's their order of importance.

Muriel Spark

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

Muriel Spark

People who want to write books do so because they feel it to be the easiest thing they can do. They can read and write, they can afford any of the instruments of book writing such as pens, paper, computers, tape recorders, and generally by the time t...

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, ...

Muriel Spark

Believing the lie that time will heal all wounds is just a nice way of saying that time deadens us.

Muriel Spark

Without an ever-present sense of death life is insipid.

Muriel Spark

There was altogether too much candor in married life; it was an indelicate modern idea, and frequently led to upsets in a household, if not divorce...

Muriel Spark

Here's the truth: People, even regular people, are never just any one person with one set of attributes. It's not that simple. We're all at the mercy of the limbic system, clouds of electricity drifting through the brain. Every man is broken into twe...

Muriel Spark

Godfrey's wife Charmian sat with her eyes closed, attempting to put her thoughts into alphabetical order which Godfrey had told her was better than no order at all, since she now had grasp of neither logic nor chronology.

Muriel Spark

You're different. You're more perfect. Time is three things for most people, but for you, for us, just one. A singularity. One moment. This moment. Like you're the center of the clock, the axis on which the hands turn. Time moves about you but never ...

Muriel Spark

I see no reason to keep silent about my enjoyment of the sound of my own voice as I work.

Muriel Spark

The word "education" comes from the root e from ex, out, and duco, I lead. It means a leading out. To me education is a leading out of what is already there in the pupil's soul.

Muriel Spark

Author Bio

  • NameMuriel Spark
  • DescriptionScottish writer
  • AliasesMuriel Sarah Camberg
  • BornFebruary 1, 1918
  • DiedApril 13, 2006
  • CountryUnited Kingdom
  • ProfessionWriter; Poet; Novelist; Playwright; Editor
  • WorksThe Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie; The Mandelbaum Gate; The Driver's Seat; Memento Mori; The Comforters; The Ballad Of Peckham Rye; The Bachelors; The Girls Of Slender Means; The Public Image; The Takeover; Territorial Rights; Loitering With Intent; A Far Cry From Kensington; Symposium; Aiding And Abetting; The Finishing School
  • AwardsDame Commander Of The Order Of The British Empire; James Tait Black Memorial Prize