Elizabeth Bowen
Elizabeth Bowen
Elizabeth Bowen, CBEwas an Anglo-Irish novelist and short story writer...
NationalityIrish
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth7 June 1899
CountryIreland
writing character mean
Dialogue is the ideal means of showing what is between the characters. It crystallizes relationships. It should, ideally, be so effective as to make analysis or explanation of the relationships between the characters unnecessary.
truth mean reality
What is a novel? I say: an invented story. At the same time a story which, though invented has the power to ring true. True to what? True to life as the reader knows life to be or, it may be, feels life to be. And I mean the adult, the grown-up reader. Such a reader has outgrown fairy tales, and we do not want the fantastic and the impossible. So I say to you that a novel must stand up to the adult tests of reality.
mean doe novelists
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.
mean law visionaries
The short story is at an advantage over the novel, and can claim its nearer kinship to poetry, because it must be more concentrated, can be more visionary, and is not weighed down (as the novel is bound to be) by facts, explanation, or analysis. I do not mean to say that the short story is by any means exempt from the laws of narrative: it must observe them, but on its own terms.
disaster fact incorrect people tv
It could've been a disaster for people who couldn't see it on TV, so to speak. The fact that it was incorrect on TV alarmed me.
truth
Nobody speaks the truth when there is something they must have.
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
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
life conceited narcissism
Nobody can be kinder than the narcissist while you react to life in his own terms.
country literature married
Ireland is a great country to die or be married in.
taken greatness want
All your youth you want to have your greatness taken for granted; when you find it taken for granted, you are unnerved.
war brain literature
Fantasy is toxic: the private cruelty and the world war both have their start in the heated brain.
writing ideas surface
If a theme or idea is too near the surface, the novel becomes simply a tract illustrating an idea.
passion may habit
Habit, of which passion must be wary, may all the same be the sweetest part of love.