Muriel Spark Quotes

If you wait, all that happens is that you get older.

Do not waste time dreaming of great faraway opportunities; do the best you can where you are. Open your petals of power and beauty and fling out the fragrance of your life in the place that has been assigned to you.

You know, you get to a certain age, 45, 50, I don't know when it happens, I said, 'Jesus, all I got is a certain amount of time. Maybe I should think about using it a little better.'

I'm at this time in life when I have to take the opportunities I have left.

Life is what you make it: If you snooze, you lose; and if you snore, you lose more.

And I'm not as young as I once was. At my age, I don't have time to be bored.

The two most important requirements for major success are: first, being in the right place at the right time, and second, doing something about it.

We cannot put off living until we are ready.

I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them.

I'm aiming by the time I'm fifty to stop being an adolescent.

At different times in my life, I've made grand statements like, 'I want these many kids, and I want them by this age.' I think, with every year that goes by, I accept that I don't know when it's going to happen or how it's going to happen. I'll just take it one day at a time, and when I'm ready, I'll be ready. It'll reveal itself, I guess.

But I'm trying not to be cynical - I don't want to be one of those people who has a cool opportunity and blows it. It's really amazing what's happening to me.

The success or failure of a life, as far as posterity goes, seems to lie in the more or less luck of seizing the right moment of escape.

I'm about to turn 48, and I think that the closer I get to 50, the more I might be interested in fatherhood. But honestly, I'm not grown up yet myself.

There is no age better than another. The commitment to give of yourself and the knowledge that the time is right are what's important.

There's no time for regrets. You've just got to keep moving forward.

When you talk to people who are old, some wish they had enjoyed themselves more, but not many wish they had wasted more time.

I didn't want to fall into the trap of complacency.

I definitely don't think I'm going to have a mid-life crisis.

Even in real life, at least I have that very strong sense of timing to do things when they are meant to be done. Like when to stop colouring your hair, when to do whatever, and to live by it too.

You are a long time retired. I don't want to sit there when that happens and think, 'Oh, I wish I had done that better'. I just think everything I can do, that is always the way that I have been. I don't want to have any regrets.

It's a terrible thing, I think, in life to wait until you're ready. I have this feeling now that actually no one is ever ready to do anything. There is almost no such thing as ready. There is only now. And you may as well do it now. Generally speaking, now is as good a time as any.

So far, this is the oldest I've been.

When opportunity comes it is too late to prepare.

Money won't change you, but time will take you out.