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Elizabeth Bowen Quotes about Character

All Elizabeth Bowen Quotes Art Character quotes Children Country Dialogue Expectations Experience Feelings Heart History Home House Imagination Ireland Language Life Literature Loneliness Love Lying Memories Passion Pleasure Reading Running Silence Solitude Spring Suffering Travel Truth War Writing
Some people are molded by their admirations, others by their hostilities.

Some people are molded by their admirations, others by their hostilities.

Elizabeth Bowen
Character, People, Personality

Dialogue is the ideal means of showing what is between the characters. It crystallizes relationships. It should, ideally, be so effective as to make analysis or explanation of the relationships between the characters unnecessary.

Elizabeth Bowen
Writing, Character, Mean
Elizabeth Bowen (1950). “Collected Impressions”

Characters are not created by writers. They pre-exist and have to be found.

Elizabeth Bowen
Character, Found

Roughly, the action of a character should be unpredictable before it has been shown, inevitable when it has been shown. In the first half of a novel, the unpredictability should be the more striking. In the second half, the inevitability should be the more striking.

Elizabeth Bowen
Character, Half, Firsts
Elizabeth Bowen (1950). “Collected Impressions”

Jane Austen, much in advance of her day, was a mistress of the use of the dialogue. She used it as dialogue should be used-to advance the story; not only to show the characters, but to advance.

Elizabeth Bowen
Character, Writing, Mistress

Dialogue in fiction is what characters do to one another.

Elizabeth Bowen
Character, Fiction, Crafts

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 a novel are capable. Speech is what characters do to each other.

Elizabeth Bowen
Writing, Character, Fighting
Elizabeth Bowen (2015). “The Mulberry Tree”, p.41, Random House

As a novelist, I cannot occupy myself with "characters," or at any rate central ones, who lack panache, in one or another sense, who would be incapable of a major action or a major passion, or who have not a touch of the ambiguity, the ultimate unaccountability, the enlarging mistiness of persons "in history." History, as more austerely I now know it, is not romantic. But I am.

Elizabeth Bowen
Passion, Character, History

I became, and remain, my characters' close and intent watcher: their director, never. Their creator I cannot feel that I was, or am.

Elizabeth Bowen
Character, Directors, Literature
Elizabeth Bowen (1975). “Pictures and conversations”, Knopf Books for Young Readers

No one of the characters in my novels has originated, so far as I know, in real life. If anything, the contrary was the case: persons playing a part in my life--the first twenty years of it--had about them something semi-fictitious.

Elizabeth Bowen
Real, Character, Years
Elizabeth Bowen (1975). “Pictures and conversations”, Lane, Allen

Meetings that do not come off keep a character of their own. They stay as they were projected.

Elizabeth Bowen
Character, Meetings
ELIZABETH BOWEN (1935). “The House in Paris”

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.

Elizabeth Bowen
Character, Plot, Should
Elizabeth Bowen (1975). “Pictures and conversations”, Lane, Allen

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.

Elizabeth Bowen
Writing, Character, Unique
Elizabeth Bowen (1950). “Collected Impressions”

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