Iris Murdoch Quotes
A bad review is even less important than whether it is raining in Patagonia.
Murdoch, Iris. The Sea, the Sea. Chatto & Windus, 1978.
In 1852, when the national debate on slavery was raging, Stowe’s book, Uncle Tom's Cabin, was published and within 16 months had sold a million copies. Its mass media effect developed a ground swell against slavery as well as over 30 rebuttal books. Many credited her book with the consciousness raising that was necessary to support the North and alarm the South.
Hartman and the other few advisors who Ford had consulted had opposed the idea of a Nixon pardon. However, Ford went ahead with it, and it probably cost him the reelection. Most people two decades later tended to agree with Hartman’s later view in this quotation.
Dame Jean Iris Murdoch DBE was an Irish and British novelist and philosopher. Murdoch is best known for her novels about good and evil, sexual relationships, morality, and the power of the unconscious. Her first published novel, Under the Net, was selected in 1998 as one of Modern Library's 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. Her 1978 novel The Sea, the Sea won the Booker Prize. In 1987, she was made a Dame by Queen Elizabeth II for services to literature. In 2008, The Times ranked Murdoch twelfth on a list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".
