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
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
When I read a story, I relive the moment from which it sprang. A scene burned itself into me, a building magnetized… — 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
The story must spring from an impression or perception pressing enough to have made the writer write. It should magnetize the imagination… — Elizabeth Bowen Copy Share Image
every short story is an experiment - what one must ask is not only, did it come off, but was it, as… — Elizabeth Bowen Copy Share Image
Jane Austen, much in advance of her day, was a mistress of the use of the dialogue. She used it as dialogue… — Elizabeth Bowen Copy Share Image
[My early stories] are the work of a living writer whom I know in a sense, but can never meet. — Elizabeth Bowen Copy Share Image
I am dead against art's being self-expression. I see an inherent failure in any story which fails to detach itself from the… — 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
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 Image
“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 Image
It is not our exalted feelings, it is our sentiments that build the necessary home. — Elizabeth Bowen Copy Share Image
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 Image
without fiction, either life would be insufficient or the winds from the north would blow too cold. — Elizabeth Bowen Copy Share Image
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 Image
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 Image
To walk into history is to be free at once, to be at large among people. — Elizabeth Bowen Copy Share Image
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 Image
“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 Image