Iris Murdoch Quotes

If the novelist shares his or her problems with the characters, he or she is able to study his personal unconscious.

Every piece of writing I've done has been something where I feel like I need to get this out of me, whether it's a seed of something personal or an anxiety that turns into a play or an image that's in my mind and haunts me that I'm trying to investigate.

Every time you play a bad girl or guy in a movie, you really come from a place of pain.

'Orphans' reflects unconscious elements in myself that were, at the time, indigestible and butting up against each other in my psyche; issues I wasn't really in touch with but was trying to put into a dramatic framework.

Since many years, I realized that I have a darker side in me, even though I still believe I'm a very positive person. But still, there is still darkness that makes me write music and create in general, and it affects everything that I do. I believe it's a beautiful darkness.

The artist who paints the emotions creates an enclosed world... the picture... which, like a book, has the same interest no matter where it happens to be. Such an artist, we may imagine, spends a great deal of time doing nothing but looking, both around him and inside him.

To a great extent, I still write for myself, write what amuses me. Fortunately, I have a quirky sort of strange sense of humor that appeals to other people and that's good. I still sort of write for myself though there are some areas of the book I feel I have to put in and I feel I have to deliver.

The writer's life seethes within but not without.

The thing about the books is that they really talked a lot about what was going on inside of Bond and the inner dialogue. It's very hard to project that onto a screen because Bond doesn't talk a lot about how he feels. But, when you have an actor like Daniel Craig, he's able to convey the inner turmoil and the conflicts. He's given Bond his humanity.

Prowling about the rooms, sitting down, getting up, stirring the fire, looking out the window, teasing my hair, sitting down to write, writing nothing, writing something and tearing it up...

Our passions shape our books, repose writes them in the intervals.

An artist must learn to be nourished by his passions and by his despairs.

I've always had a great love of music since childhood. It changes every day.. every time you write, it's a new experience. It's a self expression.

I try to write every day. I don't beat myself up about word counts, or how many hours are ticking by on the clock before I'm allowed to go and do something else. I just try to keep a hand in and work every single day, even if there are other demands or I'm on a book tour or have the flu or something, because then I keep my unconscious engaged with the book. Then I'm always a little bit writing, no matter what else I'm doing.

For whatever reason, I have an emotional life that wants to come out.

I thought, if I write a book that is not a retelling of Pride and Prejudice, it's not going to mean that I will not get any criticism. I might as well write the book that I want to write.

Poets and novelists and playwrights make themselves, against terrible resistances, give over what the rest of us keep safely locked within our hearts.

... in nine out of ten cases the original wish to write is the wish to make oneself felt[ellipsis in source] the non-essential writer never gets past that wish.

At the heart of all photography is an urge to express our deepest personal feelings - to reveal our inner, hidden selves, to unlock the artist. Those of us who become photographers are never satisfied with just looking at someone else's expression of something that is dear to us. We must produce our own images, instead of buying postcards and photo books. We seek to make our own statements of individuality.

Conflicts create the fire of affects and emotions; and like every fire it has two aspects: that of burning and that of giving light.

I think my apocalyptic feelings went deeper than [heavily influenced by Reagan and AIDS]. I'm really at peace with how afraid I am.

Looking back on the long-stretched-out body of one's work, it is interesting to mark the endless duel fought within a man between the emotional and critical sides of his nature, first one, then the other, getting the upper hand, and too seldom fusing till the result has the mellowness of full achievement. One can even tell the nature of one's readers, by their preference for the work which reveals more of this side than of that.

Each book is, in a sense, an argument with myself, and I would write it, whether it is ever published or not.

They say that I am a poet I wonder what they would say if they saw me from the inside I bottle emotions and place them into the sea for others to unbottle on distant shores I am unsure as to whether they ever reach and for that matter as to whether I ever get my point across or my love

Inside it drives me crazy, my insecurities could eat me alive.