Quote

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

Elizabeth Bowen

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Elizabeth Bowen
Age: 73 †
Born: 1899
Born: June 7
Died: 1973
Died: February 22
Novelist
Short Story Writer
Writer
Dublin city
Elisabeth Bowen
Found
Character
Writers
Characters
Created
Exist

More quotes by Elizabeth Bowen

Image
At the age of twelve I was finding the world too small: it appeared to me like a dull, trim back garden, in which only trivial games could be played.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
In 'real life' everything is diluted in the novel everything is condensed.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
life is a succession of readjustments.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
One can live in the shadow of an idea without grasping it.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
Where would the Irish be without someone to be Irish at?
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
Silence sat in the taxi, as though a stranger had got in.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
Solitary and farouche people don't have relationships they are quite unrelatable.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
Reason can never reconcile one to life: nothing allays the wants one cannot explain.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
children like change - for one thing, they never anticipate regret.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
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
Image
But surely love wouldn't get so much talked about if there were not something in it?
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
What I have found is, anything one keeps hidden should now and then be hidden somewhere else.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
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
Image
After inside upheavals, it is important to fix on imperturbable things. Their imperturbableness, their air that nothing has happened renews our guarantee.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
Young girls like the excess of any quality. Without knowing, they want to suffer, to suffer they must exaggerate they like to have loud chords struck on them.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
[A writer] should try not to be too far, personally, below the level of his work.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
Childish fantasy, like the sheath over the bud, not only protects but curbs the terrible budding spirit, protects not only innocence from the world, but the world from the power of innocence.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
Nothing, that is say no one, can be such an inexorable tour-conductor as one's own conscience or sense of duty, if one allows either the upper hand: the self-bullying that goes on in the name of sight-seeing is grievous.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
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.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
Yes, writing a novel, my boy, is like driving pigs to market - you have one of them making a bolt down the wrong lane another won't get over the right stile.
Elizabeth Bowen