The child lives in the book; but just as much the book lives in the child. — Elizabeth Bowen Copy Share Image
In 'real life' everything is diluted; in the novel everything is condensed. — Elizabeth Bowen Copy Share Image
Art, at any rate in a novel, must be indissolubly linked with craft. — Elizabeth Bowen Copy Share Image
the slight sense of degeneracy induced by reading novels before luncheon — Elizabeth Bowen Copy Share Image
The novel does not simply recount experience, it adds to experience. — Elizabeth Bowen Copy Share Image
My writing, I am prepared to think, may be a substitute for something I have been born without - a so-called normal… — Elizabeth Bowen Copy Share Image
Yes, writing a novel, my boy, is like driving pigs to market - you have one of them making a bolt down… — Elizabeth Bowen Copy Share Image
the process of reading is reciprocal; the book is no more than a formula, to be furnished out with images out of… — Elizabeth Bowen Copy Share Image
If a theme or idea is too near the surface, the novel becomes simply a tract illustrating an idea. — Elizabeth Bowen Copy Share Image
What must novel dialogue . . . really be and do? It must be pointed, intentional, relevant. It must crystallize situation. It… — Elizabeth Bowen Copy Share Image
... a novel survives because of its basic truthfulness, its having within it something general and universal, and a quality of imaginative… — Elizabeth Bowen Copy Share Image
The most striking fault in work by young or beginning novelists, submitted for criticism, is irrelevance--due either to infatuation or indecision. To… — Elizabeth Bowen Copy Share 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… — Elizabeth Bowen Copy Share Image
Story involves action. Action towards an end not to be foreseen (by the reader) but also towards an end which, having been… — Elizabeth Bowen Copy Share Image
History is not a book, arbitrarily divided into chapters, or a drama chopped into separate acts; it has flowed forward. Rome is… — Elizabeth Bowen Copy Share Image
... into the novel goes such taste as I have for rational behaviour and social portraiture. The short story, as I see… — Elizabeth Bowen Copy Share Image
No one of the characters in my novels has originated, so far as I know, in real life. If anything, the contrary… — Elizabeth Bowen Copy Share Image
What is a novel? I say: an invented story. At the same time a story which, though invented has the power to… — Elizabeth Bowen Copy Share Image
The short story is at an advantage over the novel, and can claim its nearer kinship to poetry, because it must be… — Elizabeth Bowen Copy Share Image
A novel which survives, which withstands and outlives time, does do something more than merely survive. It does not stand still. It… — Elizabeth Bowen Copy Share Image
Temperamentally, the writer exists on happenings, on contacts, conflicts, action and reaction, speed, pressure, tension. Were he acontemplative purely, he would not write. — Elizabeth Bowen Copy Share
“Are you really an orphan? Yes, I am, said Portia a shade shortly. Are you? No, not at present, but I suppose it's a… — Elizabeth Bowen Copy Share
It is not our exalted feelings, it is our sentiments that build the necessary home. — Elizabeth Bowen Copy Share
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… — Elizabeth Bowen Copy Share
without fiction, either life would be insufficient or the winds from the north would blow too cold. — Elizabeth Bowen Copy Share
One's sentiments -- call them that -- one's fidelities are so instinctive that one hardly knows they exist: only when they are betrayed or,… — Elizabeth Bowen Copy Share
Only in a house where one has learnt to be lonely does one have this solicitude for things. One's relation to them, the daily… — Elizabeth Bowen Copy Share
To walk into history is to be free at once, to be at large among people. — Elizabeth Bowen Copy Share
The wish to lead out one's lover must be a tribal feeling; the wish to be seen as loved is part of one's self-respect. — Elizabeth Bowen Copy Share
“First love, with its frantic haughty imagination, swings its object clear of the everyday, over the rut of living, making him all looks, silences,… — Elizabeth Bowen Copy Share
That is partly why women marry - to keep up the fiction of being in the hub of things. — Elizabeth Bowen Copy Share
“But Miss Pym gave an impression, somehow, of having been attacked from within .” — Elizabeth Bowen Copy Share
rudeness to Mrs. Dosely was like dropping a pat of butter on to a hot plate - it slid and melted away. — Elizabeth Bowen Copy Share
