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... in nine out of ten cases the original wish to write is the wish to make oneself felt[ellipsis in source] the non-essential writer never gets past that wish.

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
Write
Ten
Felt
Essentials
Past
Oneself
Writing
Gets
Ellipsis
Make
Source
Originals
Never
Writer
Original
Cases
Essential
Wish
Nine

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Art is one thing that can go on mattering once it has stopped hurting.
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one should discuss one's difficulties only when they are over.
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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.
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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
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... 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.
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[My early stories] are the work of a living writer whom I know in a sense, but can never meet.
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The novel does not simply recount experience, it adds to experience.
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Fantasy is toxic: the private cruelty and the world war both have their start in the heated brain.
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Sport and death are the two great socializing factors in Ireland.
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Imagination of my kind is most caught, most fired, most worked upon by the unfamiliar: I have thrivenon the changes and chances, the dislocations andcontrasts which have made up so much of my life.
Elizabeth Bowen
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Habit, of which passion must be wary, may all the same be the sweetest part of love.
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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.
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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.
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I became, and remain, my characters' close and intent watcher: their director, never. Their creator I cannot feel that I was, or am.
Elizabeth Bowen
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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
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I suspect victims they win in the long run.
Elizabeth Bowen
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Dogs are a habit, I think.
Elizabeth Bowen
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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
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The story must spring from an impression or perception pressing enough to have made the writer write. It should magnetize the imagination and give pleasure.
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