Elizabeth Bowen - Writing Quotes

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

Elizabeth Bowen

Gerald's straight, round writing had, to her imagination, a queer totter, like someone running for life in tight shoes.

Elizabeth Bowen

Often when I write I am trying to make words do the work of line and color. I have the painter's sensitivity to light. Much... of my writing is verbal painting.

Elizabeth Bowen

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.

Elizabeth Bowen

My writing, I am prepared to think, may be a substitute for something I have been born without — a so-called normal relation to society. My books are my relation to society.

Elizabeth Bowen

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.

Elizabeth Bowen

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.

Elizabeth Bowen