What a test that is: more than devotion, admiration, passion. If you long and long for someoneβs company you love them.
But fantasy kills imagination, pornography is death to art.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Fantasy can stifle creativity, and pornographic content destroys the essence of artistic expression.
In this quote, Iris Murdoch emphasizes the detrimental effects that both fantasy and pornography can have on genuine creativity and artistic expression. She suggests that when creativity is clouded by unrealistic or superficial fantasies, it limits the depth and originality of imagination, whereas pornography degrades authentic artistic endeavors, reducing them to mere explicitness rather than allowing them to evoke genuine emotions and insights.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
In a lecture on the impact of media on creativity, one might use this quote by Iris Murdoch to illustrate how certain influences can hinder artistic growth.
More from Iris Murdoch
All quotes βThe bicycle is the most civilized conveyance known to man. Other forms of transport grow daily more nightmarish. Only the bicycle remains pure in heart.
Man's creative struggle, his search for wisdom and truth, is a love story.
All art deals with the absurd and aims at the simple. Good art speaks truth, indeed is truth, perhaps the only truth.
A bad review is even less important than whether it is raining in Patagonia.
Perhaps when distant people on other planets pick up some wavelength of ours all they hear is a continuous scream.
Similar quotes
Then I thought, Whoa. If there are no photographs, then there is no history. I'm going to get in there. I'm going to make these pictures. We need a record.
She said it out loud, the words distributed into a room that was full of cold air and books. Books everywhere! Each wall was armed with overcrowded yet immaculate shelving. It was barely possible to see paintwork. There were all different styles and sizes of lettering on the spines of the black, the red, the gray, the every-colored books. It was one of the most beautiful things Liesel Meminger had ever seen. With wonder, she smiled. That such a room existed!
The structure of a play is always the story of how the birds came home to roost.
If you want your writing to be taken seriously, don't marry and have kids, and above all, don't die. But if you have to die, commit suicide. They approve of that.
I feel so entirely in my element with a full orchestra; even if my mortal enemies were marshalled before me, I could lead them, master them, surround them, or repulse them.
The thing that influenced me most was the way Tommy played his trombone. It was my idea to make my voice work in the same way as a trombone or violin-not sounding like them, but "playing" the voice like those instrumentalists.