Elizabeth Bowen Quotes

For kind of sophisticated art I'm interested in, the larger structural rebuke has to be so subtle that it has to be distributed at an almost sub-atomic level. Otherwise, you fall into the kind of preachy, moralistic fable that I don't think makes for good literature.

Symbolism perhaps is a bit in your face, and I've tried my best to control that as best I can as I've grown older and thought that one could approach something with a little more subtlety.

One of the biggest problems in literature is the lack of subtlety.

Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.

My book has a very simple surface, but there are layers of irony and paradox all the way through it.

To me, a story can be both concrete and abstract, or a concrete story can hold abstractions. And abstractions are things that really can't be said so well with words.

Everything in this world has a hidden meaning.

I wanted to write a novel where the meaning is in the story and characters and the subliminal, in the shades and nuances. It's exciting to develop that as a writer.

I think 'The Thing' is so good because it's not just a scary movie. It's also social commentary, which works on multiple levels, which is something I really respond to.

The purpose of narrative is to present us with complexity and ambiguity.

The secret of it is to read what you've got in front of you. Don't, if you suspect that something has a double meaning, don't pause. Don't put on a leery vocal expression if you know what I mean on radio. Don't sort of do anything other than read it.

It is the test of a novel writer's art that he conceal his snake-in-the-grass; but the reader may be sure that it is always there.

I get drawn in when I feel there is something deep and mysterious going on beneath the surface of something.

Lyrics need to be good, but they don't need to be obvious right away.

I love long sentences. My big heroes of fiction writing are Henry James and Proust - people who recognise that life doesn't consist of declarative statements, but rather modifications, qualifications and feelings.

I seldom deal in symbolisms; if there be hidden meanings in my verse, they are there without my knowledge.

'Arcadia' is obviously a play that's got interesting things in it that are perhaps quite hard to grasp.

Sometimes with good writers you don't spot the theme, but when you come away you realise there has been one.

Sci-fi's great, but you don't have to hit people over the head with it when you're making a social comment. It just inherently exists within the fabric of the story.

I think that the audience is smart enough to know that just because a drama is relating to real-world parallels, it doesn't mean that its story is exactly that story.

Peter Morgan's writing is so much about what you don't say: you're saying one thing but there's 10 other things going on, and those are the best writers like Chekhov... they're masters at a sort of naturalism, and yet there is all the subtext.

I usually don't like to 'spoon feed' my audience, because I grew up idolizing story tellers who tell stories using symbolism, so it was in my nature to do the same.

The words of my book nothing, the drift of it everything.

You get a little picture that reflects the whole. You can get readers interested in the life of one guy, and he can reflect the whole life around him. And it's a better picture than the politicians give you.

I'm always just drawn to those roles that present one way and have many other things going on underneath. It's just more fun to play as an actor.