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

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Curiosity in Rome is a form of courtesy.
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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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children like change - for one thing, they never anticipate regret.
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Don't you understand that all language is dead currency? How they keep on playing shop with it all the same.
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... any fictionis bound to be transposed autobiography.
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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.
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Darling, I don't want you I've got no place for you I only want what you give. I don't want the whole of anyone.... What you want is the whole of me-isn't it, isn't it?-and the whole of me isn't there for anybody. In that full sense you want me I don't exist.
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It is not helpful to help a friend by putting coins in his pockets when he has got holes in his pockets.
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... into the novel goes such taste as I have for rational behaviour and social portraiture. The short story, as I see it to be, allows for what is crazy about humanity: obstinacies, inordinate heroisms, immortal longings.
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One can live in the shadow of an idea without grasping it.
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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.
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Habit is not mere subjugation, it is a tender tie when one remembers habit it seems to have been happiness.
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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.
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Memory must be patchy what is more alarming is its face-savingness. Something in one shrinks from catching it out - unique to oneself, one's own, one's claim to identity, it implicates one's identity in its fibbing.
Elizabeth Bowen
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Raids are slightly constipating.
Elizabeth Bowen
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Silences have a climax, when you have got to speak.
Elizabeth Bowen
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Dogs are a habit, I think.
Elizabeth Bowen
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Characters should on the whole, be under rather than over articulate. What they intend to say should be more evident, more striking (because of its greater inner importance to the plot) than what they arrive at saying.
Elizabeth Bowen
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Solitary and farouche people don't have relationships they are quite unrelatable.
Elizabeth Bowen
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The best that an individual can do is to concentrate on what he or she can do, in the course of a burning effort to do it better.
Elizabeth Bowen