Quote

[My early stories] are the work of a living writer whom I know in a sense, but can never meet.

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
Work
Never
Early
Meet
Writer
Fiction
Living
Sense
Stories

More quotes by Elizabeth Bowen

Image
She walked about with the rather fated expression you see in photographs of girls who have subsequently been murdered, but nothing had so far happened to her.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
the process of reading is reciprocal the book is no more than a formula, to be furnished out with images out of the reader's mind.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
Nobody can be kinder than the narcissist while you react to life in his own terms.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
Certain books come to meet me, as do people.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
Often when I write I am trying to make words do the work of line and color. I have the painter's sensitivity to light. Much of my writing is verbal painting.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
Dogs are a habit, I think.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
Intimacies between women often go backwards, beginning in revelations and ending in small talk.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
That is partly why women marry - to keep up the fiction of being in the hub of things.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
Habit, of which passion must be wary, may all the same be the sweetest part of love.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
Roughly, the action of a character should be unpredictable before it has been shown, inevitable when it has been shown. In the first half of a novel, the unpredictability should be the more striking. In the second half, the inevitability should be the more striking.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
Raids are slightly constipating.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
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
Image
nothing is more restful than conformity.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
I suspect victims they win in the long run.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
Exhibitionism and a nervous wish for concealment, for anonymity, thus battle inside the buyer of any piece of clothing.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
Short of a small range of physical acts-a fight, murder, lovemaking-dialogue is the most vigorous and visible inter-action of which characters in a novel are capable. Speech is what characters do to each other.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
Curiosity in Rome is a form of courtesy.
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
Some people are molded by their admirations, others by their hostilities.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
The novel does not simply recount experience, it adds to experience.
Elizabeth Bowen