Elizabeth Bowen
Elizabeth Bowen
Elizabeth Bowen, CBEwas an Anglo-Irish novelist and short story writer...
NationalityIrish
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth7 June 1899
CountryIreland
thinking people important
Education is not so important as people think.
funny dog thinking
Dogs are a habit, I think.
long-distance-relationship heart thinking
The heart may think it knows better: the senses know that absence blots people out. We really have no absent friends.
thinking literature shows
I think the main thing, don't you, is to keep the show on the road.
writing thoughtful thinking
Temperamentally, the writer exists on happenings, on contacts, conflicts, action and reaction, speed, pressure, tension. Were he acontemplative purely, he would not write.
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.
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.