Elizabeth Bowen
Elizabeth Bowen
Elizabeth Bowen, CBEwas an Anglo-Irish novelist and short story writer...
NationalityIrish
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth7 June 1899
CountryIreland
writing intelligent thinking
I am fully intelligent only when I write. I have a certain amount of small-change intelligence, which I carry round with me as, at any rate in a town, one has to carry small money, for the needs of the day, the non-writing day. But it seems to me I seldom purely think ... if I thought more I might write less.
knowing plot destination
Plot is the knowing of destination.
states subjects susceptibility
writers do not find subjects: subjects find them. There is not so much a search as a state of open susceptibility.
stories short-story experiments
every short story is an experiment - what one must ask is not only, did it come off, but was it, as an experiment, worth making?
character half firsts
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.
writing style phony
Style is the thing that's always a bit phony, and at the same time you cannot write without style.
art crafts novel
Art, at any rate in a novel, must be indissolubly linked with craft ...
void speak dread
... love dreads being isolated, being left to speak in a void -- at the beginning it would often rather listen than speak.
lying light doe
Every love has a poetic relevance of its own; each love brings to light only what to it is relevant. Outside lies the junk-yard of what does not matter.
romantic-love desire paradox
The paradox of romantic love -- that what one possesses, one can no longer desire -- was at work.
writing looks littles
... it appears to me that problems, inherent in any writing, loom unduly large when one looks ahead. Though nothing is easy, little is quite impossible.
writing eye adults
The writer, unlike his non-writing adult friend, has no predisposed outlook; he seldom observes deliberately. He sees what he didnot intend to see; he remembers what does not seem wholly possible. Inattentive learner in the schoolroom of life, he keeps some faculty free to veer and wander. His is the roving eye.
fiction stories knows
[My early stories] are the work of a living writer whom I know in a sense, but can never meet.
baby peace war
Almost everybody wore a curious limpidity of expression, like newborn babies or souls just after death. Dazed but curiously dignified.... after a criseof hysterical revulsion and tiredness, I passed beyondand became entered by a rather sublime feeling.