Elizabeth Bowen Quotes

All there is to writing is having ideas. To learn to write is to learn to have ideas.

A friend of mine who writes history books said to me that he thought that the two creatures most to be pitied were the spider and the novelist - their lives hanging by a thread spun out of their own guts. But in some ways I think writers of fiction are the creatures most to be envied, because who else besides the spider is allowed to take that fragile thread and weave it into a pattern? What a gift of grace to be able to take the chaos from within and from it to create some semblance of order.

If I get ideas independently of the act of writing, they never really fit. So for me, there's no hanging out, waiting for inspiration.

If writing is thinking and discovery and selection and order and meaning, it is also awe and reverence and mystery and magic.

I think one of the reasons I'm so thrilled with writing is because it is an act of reading for me at the same time, which is why my revisions are so sustained.

Sometimes things just fall out of your head on the paper, and if you're smart, you learn not to touch them.

The writer's joy is the thought that can become emotion, the emotion that can wholly become a thought.

Something different happens to my brain when I put pen to paper: the pace of writing or drawing slows you down and gives you more time for thoughts to come in.

... writing had become an essential element of the process of thinking. Not until I had put my thoughts down on paper could I examine them with objectivity.

It's fun because you can escape and learn about what other people's minds have created. It inspires you to think maybe you could come up with a creature yourself. I like that.

You can't learn to play the piano without playing the piano, you can't learn to write without writing, and, in many ways, you can't learn to think without thinking. Writing is thinking. To write well is to think clearly. That's why it's so hard.

I gotta pound the keys for the ideas to flow.

When I'm writing new material, I never have any trouble coming up with ideas.

Creative writing teachers should be purged until every last instructor who has uttered the words 'Write what you know' is confined to a labor camp. Please, talented scribblers, write what you don't. The blind guy with the funny little harp who composed The Iliad, how much combat do you think he saw?

The first splurge of creativity is kind of free, and the last 30 percent is painstakingly hard work, but it's good to light a fire and make it public and create that expectation. It's become part of the writing process, really, a way to ask the audience what they think, how they think it's going. I can't write songs in a vacuum.

Art goes on in your head. If you said something interesting, that might be a title for a work of art and I'd write it down.

I think I started writing because no one had ever told me you can write about the things you know in a musical. They don't have to come from some far off place.

Improv is like writing. It's actually a different discipline to acting. It helps acting greatly, but it's completely different. It's the same side of your brain when you write as when you improv.

Without a pen in my hand I can't think.

I know quite well that one needs ridiculous, mad situations like that; one can't write really well about anything else. Why was that old fellow such a marvelous propaganda technician? Because he had so many insane, excruciating things to get excited about. You've got to be hurt and upset; otherwise you can't think of the really good, penetrating, X-rayish phrases.

When I sit down at my writing desk, time seems to vanish. I think it's a wonderful way to spend one's life.

There is nothing like writing to force you to think and get your thoughts straight.

Thought engenders thought. Place one idea on paper, another will follow it, and still another, until you have written a page; you cannot fathom your mind. There is a well of thought which has no bottom; the more you draw from it, the more clear and fruitful it will be.

A writer needs three things, experience, observation, and imagination, any two of which, at times any one of which, can supply the lack of the others.