Iris Murdoch Quotes
Quotes to Explore
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I don't think I knew that you could be a novelist. I think a lot of my students are in the same condition. I thought it was unreachable, that it was sort of dead people. It took me a long time - I think I was well into novel writing before I really thought, 'Actually, this is a valid pastime.'
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I watch virtually no TV. All my screen time is computer time for me. When I'm not doing that I'm reading or talking to my friends who I got to know through computers.
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This is why I have always said that it would be better if Muslims were poor.
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Victorious living does not mean freedom from temptation, nor does it mean freedom from mistakes.
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Revolutionaries do not make revolutions. The revolutionaries are those who know when power is lying in the street and then they can pick it up.
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As many of you know I travel a good bit and do not get to see my friends and family as much as I would like.
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I've always kind of had an interest in the drums but nothing else. The drums are the only thing I feel I would be good at, because I'm a very physical person. I've always played sports and stuff. Drums would give me something to do.
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People always tell me I'm going to regret not having kids. But what if I have one and then I regret having it? Has anyone thought of that option?
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Small aim is a crime.
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And so, the youngsters you have today, even though there are far fewer of them - in World War II 16.5 million men and women in uniform, today roughly a million in uniform in spite of the fact that the country is almost twice as large a population as we had in World War II.
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Long-, medium- and short-grain rices differ in the amount and type of starch they have.
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The dove act? I'm still working on it. I don't think it's perfect yet. I got my first pair of doves when I was 14 years old. That was the beginning of the formation of that act. So it's been 24 years now that I've been working on it.
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I'm generally competing with the ideal I have set for myself, and I've found that served me very well.
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My father played guitar, so I always wanted to play for that reason. But I think the biggest reason was just the '90s in general - growing up listening to the Smashing Pumpkins, Green Day and bands like that, and going to concerts and thinking it was the coolest thing in the world.
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It is not length of life, but depth of life.
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The cardinal rule of taxation is that whatever you put a levy on, you'll inevitably get less of. Taxing corporate activity means less investing, less hiring, fewer jobs and a smaller economy, which hurts the rich, the poor and the middle class alike.
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I came to Hollywood and I loved it. It was a great time, but in my head I was still elsewhere, in Europe. I believed in a certain cinema, which I still do believe in - a certain European cinema - and as a young woman being in America, I thought I was being taken away from that.
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One of the problems with putting Huck Finn into a movie or on the stage is, you always make the white people stupid and racist. The point is, they don't know they're racist.
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I'm a pants girl. I just feel more comfortable in them.
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Nothing soothes me more after a long and maddening course of pianoforte recitals than to sit and have my teeth drilled.
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O, had I but followed the arts!
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I see that you believe in love such as the poets and romancers have represented... The poets represent love as the sculptors design beauty, as the musicians create melody; that is to say, endowed with an exquisite nervous organization, they gather up with discerning ardor the purest elements of life, the most beautiful lines of matter, and the most harmonious voices of nature.... To try to find in real life such love as this, eternal and absolute, is the same thing as to seek on the public squares such a woman as Venus or to expect nightingales to sing the symphonies of Beethoven.
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But fantasy kills imagination, pornography is death to art.
