357 Quotes by Elizabeth Bowen

Fate is not an eagle, it creeps like a rat.

Plot is the knowing of destination.

Never to lie is to have no lock on your door, you are never wholly alone.

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

If a theme or idea is too near the surface, the novel becomes simply a tract illustrating an idea.

every short story is an experiment - what one must ask is not only, did it come off, but was it, as an experiment, worth making?

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

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.

Nothing can happen nowhere. The locale of the happening always colours the happening, and often, to a degree, shapes it.