Literary Birthday - 1 February
Happy Birthday, Muriel Spark, born 1 February 1918, died 13 April 2006
Five Quotes
If you’re going to do a thing, you should do it thoroughly. If you’re going to be a Christian, you may as well be a Catholic.
For concentration you need a cat…And the tranquility of the cat will gradually come to affect you, sitting there at your desk, so that all the excitable qualities that impede your concentration compose themselves and give you back the self-command it has lost. You need not watch the cat all the time. Its presence is enough.
It is difficult for people of advanced years to start remembering they must die. It is best to form the habit while young.
[My novel] took up the sweetest part of my mind and the rarest part of my imagination; it was like being in love and better.
The true novelist is one who understands the work as a continuous poem, is a myth-maker, and the wonder of the art resides in the endless different ways of telling a story.
Spark was a prolific, award-winning Scottish novelist. Her darkly comedic voice made her one of the most distinctive writers of the twentieth century. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie was considered her masterpiece, and was made into a stage play, a TV series, and a film. In 2008 The Times newspaper named Spark in its list of ‘the 50 greatest British writers since 1945’, at #8.
by Amanda Patterson for Writers Write