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Characters are not created by writers. They pre-exist and have to be found.

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
Exist
Found
Character
Writers
Characters
Created

More quotes by Elizabeth Bowen

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Dogs are a habit, I think.
Elizabeth Bowen
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Sins cut boldly up through every class in society, but mere misdemeanours show a certain level in life.
Elizabeth Bowen
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If you look at life one way, there is always cause for alarm.
Elizabeth Bowen
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Language is a mixture of statement and evocation.
Elizabeth Bowen
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in my experience one thing you don't learn from is anything anyone set up to be a lesson what you are to know you pick up as you go along.
Elizabeth Bowen
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Mechanical difficulties with language are the outcome of internal difficulties with thought.
Elizabeth Bowen
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Certain books come to meet me, as do people.
Elizabeth Bowen
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Curiosity in Rome is a form of courtesy.
Elizabeth Bowen
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Don't you understand that all language is dead currency? How they keep on playing shop with it all the same.
Elizabeth Bowen
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No one of the characters in my novels has originated, so far as I know, in real life. If anything, the contrary was the case: persons playing a part in my life--the first twenty years of it--had about them something semi-fictitious.
Elizabeth Bowen
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The novelist's--any writer's--object is to whittle down his meaning to the exactest and finest possible point. What, of course, isfatal is when he does not know what he does mean: he has no point to sharpen.
Elizabeth Bowen
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Fantasy is toxic: the private cruelty and the world war both have their start in the heated brain.
Elizabeth Bowen
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I am fully intelligent only when I write. I have a certain amount of small-change intelligence, which I carry round with me as, at any rate in a town, one has to carry small money, for the needs of the day, the non-writing day. But it seems to me I seldom purely think ... if I thought more I might write less.
Elizabeth Bowen
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This, my first [bicycle] had an intrinsic beauty. And it opened for me an era of all but flying, which roads emptily crossing theairy, gold-gorsy Common enhanced. Nothing since has equalled that birdlike freedom.
Elizabeth Bowen
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Have not all poetic truths been already stated? The essence of a poetic truth is that no statement of it can be final.
Elizabeth Bowen
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the process of reading is reciprocal the book is no more than a formula, to be furnished out with images out of the reader's mind.
Elizabeth Bowen
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But surely love wouldn't get so much talked about if there were not something in it?
Elizabeth Bowen
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Each of us keeps, battened down inside himself, a sort of lunatic giant impossible socially, but full scale and it's the knockings and battering we sometimes hear in each other that keep our banter from utter banality.
Elizabeth Bowen
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Habit is not mere subjugation, it is a tender tie when one remembers habit it seems to have been happiness.
Elizabeth Bowen
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It is not our exalted feelings, it is our sentiments that build the necessary home.
Elizabeth Bowen