Muriel Spark

Nothing can be more puritanical in application than the virtues.

No medicine man these days can afford to be without a portable tape recorder. Without the aid of this modern device, which may be easily concealed in the undergrowth of the jungle, the old tribal authority will rapidly become undermined by the mounting influenece of modern skepticism.

Being over seventy is like being engaged in a war. All our friends are going or gone and we survive amongst the dead and dying as on a battlefield.

Enmity is catching.

I am a hoarder of two things: documents and trusted friends.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

I am putting old heads on your young shoulders … all my pupils are the crème de la crème.

Give me a girl at an impressionable age, and she is mine for life.

Muriel Spark

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