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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You can only learn by opening yourself up to engage with different sources of information. How can you learn something if you never see it, read it, or hear it?
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The greatest luxury of riches is that they enable you to escape so much good advice. The rich are always advising the poor; but the poor seldom return the compliment.
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In order to go on living one must try to escape the death involved in perfectionism.
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Dreaming by the river, I dedicated my imagination to water, to clear, green water, the water that makes the meadows green.
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But fantasy kills imagination, pornography is death to art.
