Quote

Short of a small range of physical acts-a fight, murder, lovemaking-dialogue is the most vigorous and visible inter-action of which characters in a novel are capable. Speech is what characters do to each other.

Elizabeth Bowen

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Elizabeth Bowen
Age: 73 †
Born: 1899
Born: June 7
Died: 1973
Died: February 22
Novelist
Short Story Writer
Writer
Dublin city
Elisabeth Bowen
Writing
Capable
Visible
Short
Acts
Novel
Dialogue
Fight
Range
Small
Murder
Fighting
Physical
Lovemaking
Action
Characters
Inter
Character
Speech
Vigorous

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Reason can never reconcile one to life: nothing allays the wants one cannot explain.
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All your youth you want to have your greatness taken for granted when you find it taken for granted, you are unnerved.
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Makes of men date, like makes of car.
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My writing, I am prepared to think, may be a substitute for something I have been born without - a so-called normal relation to society. My books are my relation to society.
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Autumn arrives in early morning, but spring at the close of a winter day.
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Raids are slightly constipating.
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When you love someone all your saved up wishes start coming out.
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Characters are not created by writers. They pre-exist and have to be found.
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The best that an individual can do is to concentrate on what he or she can do, in the course of a burning effort to do it better.
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I became, and remain, my characters' close and intent watcher: their director, never. Their creator I cannot feel that I was, or am.
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If you look at life one way, there is always cause for alarm.
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... in nine out of ten cases the original wish to write is the wish to make oneself felt[ellipsis in source] the non-essential writer never gets past that wish.
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... it appears to me that problems, inherent in any writing, loom unduly large when one looks ahead. Though nothing is easy, little is quite impossible.
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very young people are true but not resounding instruments.
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fashion seems to exist for an abstract person who is not you or me.
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To walk into history is to be free at once, to be at large among people.
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children like change - for one thing, they never anticipate regret.
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It is not helpful to help a friend by putting coins in his pockets when he has got holes in his pockets.
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But surely love wouldn't get so much talked about if there were not something in it?
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Dialogue must appear realistic without being so. Actual realism-the lifting, as it were, of passages from a stenographer's take-down of a 'real life' conversation-would be disruptive. Of what? Of the illusion of the novel. In 'real life' everything is diluted in the novel everything is condensed.
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