Elizabeth Bowen Quotes - Page 8

The story must spring from an impression or perception pressing enough to have made the writer write. It should magnetize the imagination and give pleasure.

What's the matter with this country is the matter with the lot of us individually - our sense of personality is a sense of outrage.

I know that I have in my make-up layers of synthetic experiences, and that the most powerful of my memories are only half true.

One's sentiments -- call them that -- one's fidelities are so instinctive that one hardly knows they exist: only when they are betrayed or, worse still, when one betrays them does one realize their power.

Art, at any rate in a novel, must be indissolubly linked with craft.

Exhibitionism and a nervous wish for concealment, for anonymity, thus battle inside the buyer of any piece of clothing.

Meeting people unlike oneself does not enlarge one's outlook; it only confirms one's idea that one is unique.

Autumn arrives in the early morning.

A Bowen, in the first place, made Bowen's Court. Since then, with a rather alarming sureness, Bowen's Court has made all the succeeding Bowens.

The importance to the writer of first writing must be out of all proportion of the actual value of what is written.

Dialogue should show the relationships among people.

All your youth you want to have your greatness taken for granted; when you find it taken for granted, you are unnerved.

Plot is the knowing of destination.

whenever possible I avoid talking. Reprieve from talking is my idea of a holiday. At risk of seeming unsociable, which I am, I admit I love to be left in a beatific trance, when I am in one. Friendly Romans recognize that wish.

Ghosts, we hope, may be always with us - that is, never too far out of the reach of fancy. On the whole, it would seem they adapt themselves well, perhaps better than we do, to changing world conditions - they enlarge their domain, shift their hold on our nerves, and, dispossessed of one habitat, set up house in another. The universal battiness of our century looks like providing them with a propitious climate.

Sacrificers ... are not the ones to pity. The ones to pity are those that they sacrifice. Oh, the sacrificers, they get it both ways. A person knows themselves that they're able to do without.

I can't see or feel the conflict between love and religion. To me, they're the same thing.

...the power-loving temperament is more dangerous when it either prefers or is forced to operate in what is materially a void. Wehave everything to dread from the dispossessed.

Nobody can be kinder than the narcissist while you react to life in his own terms.

Also, perhaps children are sterner than grown-up people in their refusal to suffer, in their refusal, even, to feel at all.

Characters should on the whole, be under rather than over articulate. What they intend to say should be more evident, more striking (because of its greater inner importance to the plot) than what they arrive at saying.

The child lives in the book; but just as much the book lives in the child.

writers do not find subjects: subjects find them. There is not so much a search as a state of open susceptibility.

... it appears to me that problems, inherent in any writing, loom unduly large when one looks ahead. Though nothing is easy, little is quite impossible.

What must novel dialogue . . . really be and do? It must be pointed, intentional, relevant. It must crystallize situation. It must express character. It must advance plot. During dialogue, the characters confront one another. The confrontation is in itself an occasion. Each one of these occasions, throughout the novel, is unique.