Quote

Though not all reading children grow up to be writers, I take it that most creative writers must in their day have been reading children.

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
Creative
Though
Reading
Book
Take
Must
Writers
Children
Grow
Grows

More quotes by Elizabeth Bowen

Image
nothing is more restful than conformity.
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
Curiosity in Rome is a form of courtesy.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
Pity the selfishness of lovers: it is brief, a forlorn hope it is impossible.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
Makes of men date, like makes of car.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
All good dialogue perhaps deals with something unprecedented.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
Characters are not created by writers. They pre-exist and have to be found.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
... a novel survives because of its basic truthfulness, its having within it something general and universal, and a quality of imaginative perception which applies just as much now as it did in the fifty or hundred or two hundred years since the novel came to life.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
But surely love wouldn't get so much talked about if there were not something in it?
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
Nothing arrives on paper as it started, and so much arrives that never started at all. To write is always to rave a little-even if one did once know what one meant
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
A Bowen, in the first place, made Bowen's Court. Since then, with a rather alarming sureness, Bowen's Court has made all the succeeding Bowens.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
Every love has a poetic relevance of its own each love brings to light only what to it is relevant. Outside lies the junk-yard of what does not matter.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
memory is to love what the saucer is to the cup.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
Everything is very quiet, the streets are never crowded, and the people one dislikes are out of town.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
If you look at life one way, there is always cause for alarm.
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
Someone soon to start on a journey is always a little holy.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
nobody ever dies of an indignity.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
Fantasy is toxic: the private cruelty and the world war both have their start in the heated brain.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
Solitary and farouche people don't have relationships they are quite unrelatable. If you and I were capable of being altogether house-trained and made jolly, we should be nicer people, but not writers.
Elizabeth Bowen