Parents learn a lot from their children about coping with life.
—Muriel Spark
Topics: Parenting, Parents
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.
—Muriel Spark
Topics: Education
It is impossible to persuade a man who does not disagree, but smiles.
—Muriel Spark
Topics: Smile
One should only see a psychiatrist out of boredom.
—Muriel Spark
Topics: Psychiatry
Being over seventy is like being engaged in a war. All our friends are going or gone and we survive amongst the dead and the dying as on a battlefield.
—Muriel Spark
Topics: Aging, Age
I see no reason to keep silent about my enjoyment of the sound of my own voice as I work.
—Muriel Spark
Topics: Enjoyment
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.
—Muriel Spark
Topics: Potential
If I had my life over again I should form the habit of nightly composing myself to thoughts of death. I would practice, 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. You might as well live on the whites of eggs.
—Muriel Spark
Topics: Dying, Death
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.
—Muriel Spark
Topics: Religion
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
—Muriel Spark
Topics: Weather
I wouldn’t take the Pope too seriously. He’s a Pole first, a pope second, and maybe a Christian third.
—Muriel Spark
Topics: Religion
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Seamus Heaney Irish Poet, Playwright
Beryl Bainbridge British Novelist
A. S. Byatt English Novelist, Poet
Julian Barnes British Novelist, Critic
Norman Mailer American Novelist, Journalist
Peter Ustinov British Actor, Playwright
John le Carre English Novelist
Douglas Adams British Author
Raymond Chandler American Novelist
Joan Aiken British Fantasy Writer