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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

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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
Conflict
Thoughtful
Writer
Tension
Write
Reactions
Action
Contact
Temperamentally
Writing
Happenings
Contacts
Would
Exists
Conflicts
Thinking
Speed
Purely
Pressure
Reaction

More quotes by Elizabeth Bowen

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That is partly why women marry - to keep up the fiction of being in the hub of things.
Elizabeth Bowen
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In 'real life' everything is diluted in the novel everything is condensed.
Elizabeth Bowen
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Autumn arrives in early morning, but spring at the close of a winter day.
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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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... any fictionis bound to be transposed autobiography.
Elizabeth Bowen
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Nobody speaks the truth when there's something they must have.
Elizabeth Bowen
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Reason can never reconcile one to life: nothing allays the wants one cannot explain.
Elizabeth Bowen
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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
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The most striking fault in work by young or beginning novelists, submitted for criticism, is irrelevance--due either to infatuation or indecision. To direct such an author's attention to the imperative of relevance is certainly the most useful--and possibly the only--help that can be given.
Elizabeth Bowen
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one should discuss one's difficulties only when they are over.
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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History is not a book, arbitrarily divided into chapters, or a drama chopped into separate acts it has flowed forward. Rome is a continuity, called 'eternal.' What has accumulated in this place acts on everyone, day and night, like an extra climate.
Elizabeth Bowen
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But in general, for the purposes of most novelists, the number of objects genuinely necessary for. . .describing a scene will be found to be very small.
Elizabeth Bowen
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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
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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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Everything is very quiet, the streets are never crowded, and the people one dislikes are out of town.
Elizabeth Bowen
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In big houses in which things are done properly, there is always the religious element. The diurnal cycle is observed with more feeling when there are servants to do the work.
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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Silence sat in the taxi, as though a stranger had got in.
Elizabeth Bowen
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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.
Elizabeth Bowen