Elizabeth Bowen
Elizabeth Bowen
Elizabeth Bowen, CBEwas an Anglo-Irish novelist and short story writer...
NationalityIrish
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth7 June 1899
CountryIreland
book reading people
Certain books come to meet me, as do people.
growing-up children book
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.
children book reading
The child lives in the book; but just as much the book lives in the child.
book blow wind
without fiction, either life would be insufficient or the winds from the north would blow too cold.
drama book night
History is not a book, arbitrarily divided into chapters, or a drama chopped into separate acts; it has flowed forward. Rome is a continuity, called 'eternal.' What has accumulated in this place acts on everyone, day and night, like an extra climate.
book reading mind
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.
book writing thinking
My writing, I am prepared to think, may be a substitute for something I have been born without - a so-called normal relation to society. My books are my relation to society.
giant hear impossible inside lunatic sort utter
Each of us keeps, battened down inside himself, a sort of lunatic giant - impossible socially, but full-scale - and it's the knockings and battering we sometimes hear in each other that keep our intercourse from utter banality
art stopped
Art is the only thing that can go on mattering once it has stopped hurting.
beginning ending loss small talk women
Intimacies between women go backwards, beginning with revelations and ending up in small talk without loss of esteem.
begins experience hardly itself repeat till until
Experience isn't interesting until it begins to repeat itself - in fact, till it does that, it hardly is experience
truth
Nobody speaks the truth when there is something they must have.
character directors literature
I became, and remain, my characters' close and intent watcher: their director, never. Their creator I cannot feel that I was, or am.
character crafts fiction
Dialogue in fiction is what characters do to one another.