Iris Murdoch Quotes

I hate being wrong, and I hate when people give up.

I like to say I sit alone in my room, and I fight the language. I am wildly obsessive. I can't let something go if I think it's wrong.

I don't like failing at anything.

I'm never happy with what I've written. You imagine, before you start, there's a cathedral, and the moment it starts on the page, it's a garden shed. And then you just try to make it the best shed you can.

I have a lot of what you might call creative self-loathing - I have pretty high expectations, and they seem to consistently be higher than what I'm able to accomplish.

I don't know many artists who are happy with themselves all of the time.

There was a time where I was such a perfectionist even if I made the kick, but that's no way to live. I can tell you what, that will drive you crazy. I'm very hard on myself, but if the ball goes in a little bit left of the middle, you're not going to hear me crying about it.

I hate making mistakes, and I hate conceding goals, but I try not to beat myself up too much.

I'm never happy with any record, never truly been happy.

I'm very picky; I'm never happy with anything. It's so hard to give the record away and accept that you're done.

You'll go down a dark road if you just dwell on every time you screw up. We play a very fickle position. If I make nine kicks out of 10, people are going to talk about the one I missed.

I've spent so long on some paintings that I no longer know what to think of them, and I am definitely getting harder to please; nothing satisfies me.

I was trying to write a straightforward book of sociological analysis, or at least cultural criticism, and I failed.

I can look at my early work and see what a pained struggle it was to draw what I was drawing. I was trying so hard to get this specific look that was in my head, and always falling short.

It’s being ready to accept rejection. You can work on a book for two years and get it published, and it’s like you may as well have thrown it down a well. It’s not all champagne and doing interviews with The New York Times.

I tried to make the best music that I could possibly make, and then nothing was ever good enough.

I would just like say to you with all my heart is that most everybody I know who does interesting creative work, they went through a phase of years where they had really good taste and they could tell what they were making wasn’t as good as they wanted it to be.

Survival, with honor, that outmoded and all-important word, is as difficult as ever and as all-important to a writer. Those who do not last are always more beloved since no one has to see them in their long, dull, unrelenting, no-quarter-given-and-no-quarter-received, fights that they make to do something as they believe it should be done before they die. Those who die or quit early and easy and with every good reason are preferred because they are understandable and human. Failure and well-disguised cowardice are more human and more beloved.

It took me 10 years to write a story that pleased me - that I could look at after it was published and not cringe.

It drives me crazy to do readings of my books, because if I read anything I've written in the past, I'd like to almost rewrite everything. If I could, I'd completely rewrite Fargo Rock City, and every sentence would be just slightly different. In all likelihood, most of them wouldn't be any better. Some of them would just be changed back to whatever form they used to be, before I second-guessed myself the first time.

I am irritated by my own writing. I am like a violinist whose ear is true, but whose fingers refuse to reproduce precisely the sound he hears within.

Writing this book I am like a man playing the piano with lead balls attached to his knuckles.

Acting forces you to ask yourself, 'Can my constitution take a decade of constant rejection?' And after ten years, you either make it or you don't. And the problem is they don't tell you in advance.

During my last year of college I wrote the same ten pages over and over again. Those ten pages became the first few pages of my first novel. I can still recite the opening paragraph from memory - only now I cringe when I do it because they are - surprise! - a classic example of overwriting, in addition to being a more than a little pretentious.

I feel like I failed," I said. "Don't beat yourself up," Jim said. "She might not have turned out like you planned, but that don't mean she turned out wrong.