357 Quotes by Elizabeth Bowen

It could've been a disaster for people who couldn't see it on TV, so to speak. The fact that it was incorrect on TV alarmed me.

[A writer] should try not to be too far, personally, below the level of his work.

Who is ever adequate? We all create situations each other can't live up to, then break our hearts at them because they don't.

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.

Dialogue in fiction is what characters do to one another.

Ireland is a great country to die or be married in.

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.

Experience isn't interesting until it begins to repeat itself - in fact, till it does that, it hardly is experience

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 intercourse from utter banality