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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
Never
Writer
Original
Cases
Essential
Wish
Nine
Write
Ten
Felt
Essentials
Past
Oneself
Writing
Gets
Ellipsis
Make
Source
Originals
More quotes by Elizabeth Bowen
Art, at any rate in a novel, must be indissolubly linked with craft.
Elizabeth Bowen
Nobody speaks the truth when there's something they must have.
Elizabeth Bowen
Disappointment tears the bearable film off life.
Elizabeth Bowen
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
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
Dogs are a habit, I think.
Elizabeth Bowen
In 'real life' everything is diluted in the novel everything is condensed.
Elizabeth Bowen
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
Makes of men date, like makes of car.
Elizabeth Bowen
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
Language is a mixture of statement and evocation.
Elizabeth Bowen
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
children like change - for one thing, they never anticipate regret.
Elizabeth Bowen
Have not all poetic truths been already stated? The essence of a poetic truth is that no statement of it can be final.
Elizabeth Bowen
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
Everything is very quiet, the streets are never crowded, and the people one dislikes are out of town.
Elizabeth Bowen
The paradox of romantic love -- that what one possesses, one can no longer desire -- was at work.
Elizabeth Bowen
It is not helpful to help a friend by putting coins in his pockets when he has got holes in his pockets.
Elizabeth Bowen
But surely love wouldn't get so much talked about if there were not something in it?
Elizabeth Bowen
Pity the selfishness of lovers: it is brief, a forlorn hope it is impossible.
Elizabeth Bowen
