"Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real."

"I think being a woman is like being Irish... Everyone says you're important and nice, but you take second place all the time."

"Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one's luck."

"People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us."

"One of the secrets of a happy life is continous small treats."

"Falling out of love is chiefly a matter of forgetting how charming someone is."

"We can only learn to love by loving."

"Jealousy is the most dreadfully involuntary of all sins."

"Every book is the wreck of a perfect idea."

"We live in a fantasy world, a world of illusion. The great task in life is to find reality" says Iris Murdoch. But given the state of the world, is it wise?"

"The most essential and fundamental aspect of culture is the study of literature, since this is an education in how to picture and understand human situations."

"One should go easy on smashing other people's lies. Better to concentrate on one's own."

"The absolute yearning of one human body for another particular body and its indifference to substitutes is one of life's major mysteries."

"Only the very greatest art invigorates without consoling."

"Of course reading and thinking are important but, my God, food is important too."

"For most of us, for almost all of us, truth can be attained, if at all, only in silence. It is in silence that the human spirit touches the divine."

"Those who hope, by retiring from the world, to earn a holiday from human frailty, in themselves and others, are usually disappointed."

"Our actions are like ships which we may watch set out to sea, and not know when or with what cargo they will return to port."

"Emotions really exist at the bottom of the personality or at the top. in the middle they are acted. this is why all the world is a stage."

"Anything that consoles is fake."

"Perhaps when distant people on other planets pick up some wavelength of ours all they hear is a continuous scream."

"The bicycle is the "most "civilized conveyance known to man. Other forms of transport grow daily more nightmarish. Only the bicycle remains pure in heart."

"Every artist is an unhappy lover. And unhappy lovers want to tell their story."

"People have obsessions and fears and passions which they don't admit to. I think every character is interesting and has extremes. It's the novelist privilege to see how odd everyone is."

"What a test that is: more than devotion, admiration, passion. If you long and long for someone’s company you love them."

"Starting a novel is opening a door on a misty landscape; you can still see very little but you can smell the earth and feel the wind blowing."

"We defend ourselves with descriptions and tame the world by generalizing."

"As we live our precarious lives on the brink of the void, constantly coming closer to a state of nonbeing, we are all too often aware of our fragitlity."

"What I needed with all my starved and silent soul was just that particular way of shouting back at the world."

"Youth is a marvelous garment"

"Bereavement is a darkness impenetrable to the imagination of the unbereaved"

"I feel half faded away like some figure in the background of an old picture."

"One of the secrets of a happy life is continuous small treats, and if some of these can be inexpensive and quickly procured so much the better."

"There is a gulf fixed between those who can sleep and those who cannot. It is one of the greatest divisions of the human race."

"Violence is born of the desire to escape oneself."

"In philosophy if you aren't moving at a snail's pace you aren't moving at all."

"Coffee, unless it is very good and made by somebody else, is pretty intolerable at any time."

"(I think I fell in love with you when you were shouting at Romeo and Juliet, 'Don't touch each other!')"

"Love doesn't think like that. All right, it's blind as a bat--' 'Bats have radar. Yours doesn't seem to be working."

"I felt a deep grief that crouched and stayed still as if it was afraid to move."

"There is no beyond, there is only here, the infinitely small, infinitely great and utterly demanding present."

"We are all prisoner, but the name of our cure is not freedom"

"That's how vile i am! I live Ireland, I breathe Ireland, and Christ how I loathe it, I wish I were a bloody Scot, that's how bloody awful it is being Irish!"

"Every man needs two women, a quiet home-maker, and a thrilling nymph."

"Freedom may be a value in politics, but it is not a value in morals."

"What an extraordinary satisfaction there is in cleaning things! (Does the satisfaction depend on ownership? I suspect so.)"

"Thinking about the misery of the world is a favourite contemporary occupation. and if you can't think the television set will think for you."

"The theatre is certainly a place for learning about the brevity of human glory: oh all those wonderful glittering absolutely vanished pantomimes."

"I just enjoy translating, it's like opening one's mouth and hearing someone else's voice emerge."

"White magic is black magic. a less than perfect meddling in the spiritual world can breed monsters for other people, and demons used for good can hang around and make mischief afterwards."