Iris Murdoch Art Quotations

All art is a struggle to be, in a particular sort of way, virtuous.

Art is the final cunning of the human soul which would rather do anything than face the gods.

Art is brief. (Not in a temporal sense.) [...] Words are for concealment. Art is concealment.

Art is a kind of artificial memory and the pain which attends all serious art is a sense of that factitiousness.

Art is not cozy and it is not mocked. Art tells the only truth that ultimately matters. It is the light by which human things can be mended. And after art there is, let me assure you all, nothing.

Only the very greatest art invigorates without consoling.

Then I felt too that I might take this opportunity to tie up a few loose ends, only of course loose ends can never be properly tied, one is always producing new ones. Time, like the sea, unties all knots. Judgements on people are never final, they emerge from summings up which at once suggest the need of a reconsideration. Human arrangements are nothing but loose ends and hazy reckoning, whatever art may otherwise pretend in order to console us.

It is difficult in life to be good, and difficult in art to portray goodness. Perhaps we don't know much about goodness.

Art and psychoanalysis give shape and meaning to life and that is why we adore them, but life as it is lived has no shape and meaning ...

All art deals with the absurd and aims at the simple. Good art speaks truth, indeed is truth, perhaps the only truth.

I think the novel is essentially a comic form (tragedy is for the theatre), not meaning by that full of jokes, but that it is about the absurd detail of human life, the way in which one cannot fully understand what is happening. Life is muddle and jumble and ends inconclusively, and when this is presented with great comic art the sorrows of human life can be truthfully conveyed; one is moved by the spectacle, and feels that something truthful has been told in a magic way.

But fantasy kills imagination, pornography is death to art.

Art and morality are, with certain provisos…one. Their essence is the same. The essence of both of them is love. Love is the perception of individuals. Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real. Love, and so art and morals, is the discovery of reality.