Elizabeth Bowen, CBE (/ˈboʊən/; 7 June 1899 – 22 February 1973) was an Irish novelist and short story writer, notable for some of the best fiction about life in wartime London.
Dialogue must appear realistic without being so. Actual realism-the lifting, as it were, of passages from a stenographer's take-down of a 'real life' conversation-would be disruptive. Of what? Of the illusion of the novel. In 'real life' everything is diluted; in the novel everything is condensed.
I became, and remain, my characters' close and intent watcher: their director, never. Their creator I cannot feel that I was, or am.
Sins cut boldly up through every class in society, but mere misdemeanours show a certain level in life.
Fate is not an eagle, it creeps like a rat.
If a theme or idea is too near the surface, the novel becomes simply a tract illustrating an idea.
Where would the Irish be without someone to be Irish at?
. . . any fictionis bound to be transposed autobiography.
For people who live on expectations, to face up to their realization is something of an ordeal.
Illusions are art, for the feeling person, and it is by art that we live, if we do.
It is in this unearthly first hour of spring twilight that earth's almost agonized livingness is most felt. This hour is so dreadful to some people that they hurry indoors and turn on the lights.
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.
It is not helpful to help a friend by putting coins in his pockets when he has got holes in his pockets.
Good general-purpose manners nowadays may be said to consist in knowing how much you can get away with.
Chance is better than choice; it is more lordly. Chance is God, choice is man.
the process of reading is reciprocal; the book is no more than a formula, to be furnished out with images out of the reader's mind.
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 of what does not matter.
Proust has pointed out that the predisposition to love creates its own objects; is this not also true of fear?
fashion seems to exist for an abstract person who is not you or me.
life is a succession of readjustments.
That is partly why women marry - to keep up the fiction of being in the hub of things.