Elizabeth Bowen
Two things are terrible in childhood: helplessness (being in other people's power) and apprehension - the apprehension that something is being concealed from us because it is too bad to be told.Collection: Two
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 he does not know what he does mean: he has no point to sharpen.Collection: Mean
The writer, like a swimmer caught by an undertow, is borne in an unexpected direction. He is carried to a subject which has awaited him--a subject sometimes no part of his conscious plan. Reality, the reality of sensation, has accumulated where it was least sought. To write is to be captured--captured by some experience to which one may have given hardly a thought.Collection: Writing
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.Collection: Writing
I am fully intelligent only when I write. I have a certain amount of small-change intelligence, which I carry round with me as, at any rate in a town, one has to carry small money, for the needs of the day, the non-writing day. But it seems to me I seldom purely think ... if I thought more I might write less.Collection: Writing
Forgiveness should be an act, but this is a state with him.Collection: Forgiveness
What is a novel? I say: an invented story. At the same time a story which, though invented has the power to ring true. True to what? True to life as the reader knows life to be or, it may be, feels life to be. And I mean the adult, the grown-up reader. Such a reader has outgrown fairy tales, and we do not want the fantastic and the impossible. So I say to you that a novel must stand up to the adult tests of reality.Collection: Truth
I suspect victims; they win in the long run.Collection: Running
The paradox of romantic love -- that what one possesses, one can no longer desire -- was at work.Collection: Romantic Love
... any fictionis bound to be transposed autobiography.Collection: Fiction
For people who live on expectations, to face up to their realization is something of an ordeal.Collection: People
Everything is very quiet, the streets are never crowded, and the people one dislikes are out of town.Collection: War
Style is the thing that's always a bit phony, and at the same time you cannot write without style.Collection: Writing
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.Collection: Spring
Habit is not mere subjugation, it is a tender tie; when one remembers habit it seems to have been happiness.Collection: Ties
Each of us keeps, battened down inside himself, a sort of lunatic giant; impossible socially, but full scale; and it's the knockings and battering we sometimes hear in each other that keep our banter from utter banality.Collection: Depression
Art, at any rate in a novel, must be indissolubly linked with craft.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Doe
Exhibitionism and a nervous wish for concealment, for anonymity, thus battle inside the buyer of any piece of clothing.Collection: Clothes
Autumn arrives in the early morning.Collection: 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.Collection: Home
Dialogue should show the relationships among people.Collection: Writing
Plot is the knowing of destination.Collection: Knowing
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.Collection: Holiday
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.Collection: House
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.Collection: Sacrifice
I can't see or feel the conflict between love and religion. To me, they're the same thing.Collection: Conflict
...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.Collection: Power
Also, perhaps children are sterner than grown-up people in their refusal to suffer, in their refusal, even, to feel at all.Collection: Children
The child lives in the book; but just as much the book lives in the child.Collection: Children
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.Collection: Character
... 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.Collection: Writing
writers do not find subjects: subjects find them. There is not so much a search as a state of open susceptibility.Collection: States
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.Collection: Writing
When one is a child, the disposition of objects, tables and chairs and doors, seems part of the natural order: a house-move lets in chaos - as it does for a dog.Collection: Dog
Characters are not created by writers. They pre-exist and have to be found.Collection: Character
Yes, writing a novel, my boy, is like driving pigs to market - you have one of them making a bolt down the wrong lane; another won't get over the right stile.Collection: Writing
A romantic man often feels more uplifted with two women than with one: his love seems to hit the ideal mark somewhere between two different faces.Collection: Men
I am dead against art's being self-expression. I see an inherent failure in any story which fails to detach itself from the author-detach itself in the sense that a well-blown soap-bubble detaches itself from the bowl of the blower's pipe and spherically takes off into the air as a new, whole, pure, iridescent world. Whereas the ill-blown bubble, as children know, timidly adheres to the bowl's lip, then either bursts or sinks flatly back again.Collection: Art
She walked about with the rather fated expression you see in photographs of girls who have subsequently been murdered, but nothing had so far happened to her.Collection: Girl
The most striking fault in work by young or beginning novelists, submitted for criticism, is irrelevance--due either to infatuation or indecision. To direct such an author's attention to the imperative of relevance is certainly the most useful--and possibly the only--help that can be given.Collection: Irrelevance
The short story is at an advantage over the novel, and can claim its nearer kinship to poetry, because it must be more concentrated, can be more visionary, and is not weighed down (as the novel is bound to be) by facts, explanation, or analysis. I do not mean to say that the short story is by any means exempt from the laws of narrative: it must observe them, but on its own terms.Collection: Mean
Someone soon to start on a journey is always a little holy.Collection: Travel
Nothing arrives on paper as it started, and so much arrives that never started at all. To write is always to rave a little-even if one did once know what one meantCollection: Writing
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.Collection: Character
The writer, unlike his non-writing adult friend, has no predisposed outlook; he seldom observes deliberately. He sees what he didnot intend to see; he remembers what does not seem wholly possible. Inattentive learner in the schoolroom of life, he keeps some faculty free to veer and wander. His is the roving eye.Collection: Eye
What I have found is, anything one keeps hidden should now and then be hidden somewhere else.Collection: Somewhere Else
I do like Italian graves; they look so much more lived in.Collection: Italian
All good dialogue perhaps deals with something unprecedented.Collection: Writing