Quote

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

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
Another
Lanes
Right
Pigs
Writing
Driving
Like
Market
Stile
Novel
Stiles
Boys
Bolt
Wrong
Lane
Making
Bolts

More quotes by Elizabeth Bowen

Image
Certain books come to meet me, as do people.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
Nobody speaks the truth when there's something they must have.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
Nothing can happen nowhere. The locale of the happening always colours the happening, and often, to a degree, shapes it.
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
Characters are not created by writers. They pre-exist and have to be found.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
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
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
Everything is very quiet, the streets are never crowded, and the people one dislikes are out of town.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
... 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.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
Language is a mixture of statement and evocation.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
[My early stories] are the work of a living writer whom I know in a sense, but can never meet.
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
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
Image
Habit, of which passion must be wary, may all the same be the sweetest part of love.
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
Intimacies between women often go backwards, beginning in revelations and ending in small talk.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
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
Image
What I have found is, anything one keeps hidden should now and then be hidden somewhere else.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
children like change - for one thing, they never anticipate regret.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
Temperamentally, the writer exists on happenings, on contacts, conflicts, action and reaction, speed, pressure, tension. Were he acontemplative purely, he would not write.
Elizabeth Bowen