Top 76 Quotes & Sayings by Muriel Spark

If you're going to do a thing, you should do it thoroughly. If you're going to be a Christian, you may as well be a Catholic.

One's prime is elusive. You little girls, when you grow up, must be on the alert to recognize your prime at whatever time of your life it may occur. You must then live it to the full.

I used to think it a pity that her mother rather than she had not thought of birth control.

Parents learn a lot from their children about coping with life.

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

I wouldn't take the Pope too seriously. He's a Pole first, a pope second, and maybe a Christian third.

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

To me education is a leading out of what is already there in the pupil's soul. To Miss Mackay it is a putting in of something that is not there, and that is not what I call education. I call it intrusion.

One should only see a psychiatrist out of boredom.

It is impossible to persuade a man who does not disagree, but smiles.

It is impossible to repent of love. The sin of love does not exist.

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

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

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

The words of the double-tongued are as if they were harmless, but they reach even to the inner part of the bowels. Praise be to the Lord, who distinguishes our cause and delivers us from the unjust and deceitful man.

Every communist has a fascist frown, every fascist a communist smile.

If you want to concentrate deeply on some problem, and especially some piece of writing or paper-work, you should acquire a cat . . .

Let us run up debts. One is nobody without debts.

I never trust the airlines from those countries where the pilots believe in the afterlife. You are safer when they don't.

A rebellion against a tyrant is only immoral when it hasn't got a chance.

we have invented sex guilt to take our minds off the real thing.

The true novelist is one who understands the work as a continuous poem, is a myth-maker, and the wonder of the art resides in the endless different ways of telling a story.

I have a great desire to make people smile - not laugh. Laughter is too aggressive. People bare their teeth.

Goodness, Truth and Beauty come first

Neurotics are awfully quick to notice other people's mentalities.

It is well, when in difficulties, to say never a word, neither black nor white. Speech is silver but silence is golden.

We often laughed at others in our house, and I picked up the craft of being polite while people were present and laughing later if there was anything to laugh about.

Allow me, in conclusion, to congratulate you warmly upon your sexual intercourse, as well as your singing.

It is one of the secrets of Nature in its mood of mockery that fine weather lays heavier weight on the mind and hearts of the depressed and the inwardly tormented than does a really bad day with dark rain sniveling continuously and sympathetically from a dirty sky.

So great was the noise during the day that I used to lie awake at night listening to silence.

People who quoted the Scriptures in criticism of others were terrible bores and usually they misapplied the text. One could prove anything against anyone from the Bible.

Fiction to me is a kind of parable. You have got to make up your mind it's not true. Some kind of truth emerges from it, but it's not fact.

It isn't necessarily the great and famous beauty spots we fall in love with. As with people, so with places. Love is unforeseen, and we can all find ourselves affectionately attached to the minor and the less obvious.

everything happens to an artist; time is always redeemed, nothing is lost and wonders never cease.

From my experience of life I believe my personal motto should be: 'Beware of any man bringing flowers.

To me education is a leading out of what is already there in the pupil's soul.

Beware the ire of the calm.

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.

The sacrifice of pleasures is of course itself a pleasure.

Being in love is something like poetry. Certainly, you can analyze and expound its various senses and intentions, but there is always something left over, mysteriously hovering between music and meaning.

Frankness is usually a euphemism for rudeness.

Contradictions in human character are one of its most consistent notes.

It is difficult for people of advanced years to start remembering they must die. It is best to form the habit while young.

Beware of men bearing flowers.

[My novel] took up the sweetest part of my mind and the rarest part of my imagination; it was like being in love and better. All day long when I was busy [...], I had my unfinished novel personified almost as a secret companion and accomplice following me like a shadow wherever I went, whatever I did.

How wonderful it feels to be an artist and a woman in the twentieth century.

New York, home of the vivisectors of the mind, and of the mentally vivisected still to be reassembled, of those who live intact, habitually wondering about their states of sanity, and home of those whose minds have been dead, bearing the scars of resurrection.

No mind should submit their mind to another mind He that complies against his will is of his own opinion still -- that's my motto. I won't be brainwashed.

Ridicule is the only honorable weapon we have left.

If I had my life over again I should form the habit of nightly composing myself to thoughts of death. I would practise, as it were, the remembrance of death. There is no other 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. Without an ever-present sense of death life is insipid.

If you choose the sort of life which has no conventional pattern you have to try to make an art of it, or it is a mess.

I often wonder if we were all characters in one of God's dreams.

It's a whydunnit in q-sharp major and it has a message: never talk to the sort of girls that you wouldn't leave lying about in your drawing-room for the servants to pick up.

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 the desk lamp ... The cat will settle down and be serene, with a serenity that passes all understanding.

For those who like that sort of thing," said Miss Brodie in her best Edinburgh voice, "That is the sort of thing they like.

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

The letters of famous people can be placed into two categories: there is the type of letter which becomes itself a valuable contribution to literature through its wit, style or wisdom; another kind is that whose main importance lies in the provision of a background to their author's life. Especially in the correspondence of great writers and poets, these two factors are very often combined.

She wasn't a person to whom things happen. She did all the happenings.

You look for one thing and you find another.

Jealousy ... is an affliction of the spirit which, unlike some sins of the flesh, gives no one any pleasure.