[A writer] should try not to be too far, personally, below the level of his work. — 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
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
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
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
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 importance to the writer of first writing must be out of all proportion of the actual value of what is written. — Elizabeth Bowen Copy Share Image
... in nine out of ten cases the original wish to write is the wish to make oneself felt[ellipsis in source] the… — 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… — 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 fully intelligent only when I write. I have a certain amount of small-change intelligence, which I carry round with me… — Elizabeth Bowen Copy Share Image
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… — 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
... 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
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
As a novelist, I cannot occupy myself with "characters," or at any rate central ones, who lack panache, in one or another… — 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
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 writer, like a swimmer caught by an undertow, is borne in an unexpected direction. He is carried to a subject which… — Elizabeth Bowen Copy Share Image
But in general, for the purposes of most novelists, the number of objects genuinely necessary for. . .describing a scene will be… — 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
Nothing arrives on paper as it started, and so much arrives that never started at all. To write is always to rave… — Elizabeth Bowen Copy Share Image
writers do not find subjects: subjects find them. There is not so much a search as a state of open susceptibility. — Elizabeth Bowen Copy Share Image
... it appears to me that problems, inherent in any writing, loom unduly large when one looks ahead. Though nothing is easy,… — 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
![“[A writer] should try not to be too far, personally, below the level of his work.” quote by Elizabeth Bowen](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/21f/elizabeth-bowen-1197_levels_a-writer-should-try-not-to-be-too-far-pe_2064115.jpg)
![“... in nine out of ten cases the original wish to write is the wish to make oneself felt[ellipsis in source] the non-essential writer never gets past that wish.” quote by Elizabeth Bowen](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/fb0/elizabeth-bowen-1197_cases_in-nine-out-of-ten-cases-the-original-wi_450552.jpg)
![“[My early stories] are the work of a living writer whom I know in a sense, but can never meet.” quote by Elizabeth Bowen](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/7a0/elizabeth-bowen-1197_fiction_my-early-stories-are-the-work-of-a-livin_2403622.jpg)
