Elizabeth Bowen Quotes

It is the province of poetry to be more realistic and present than the artificial narratives of an outer discourse, and not afraid of the truthful difficulty of the average human life.

Those who have been writing literature have not been writing life.

Perhaps they were right putting love into books. Perhaps it could not live anywhere else.

Some books make us dream, others bring us face to face with reality, but what matters most to the author is the honesty with which a book is written.

I don't watch like Sci-fi or things like that, I'm always more like real life is so endlessly fascinating to me.

We have art so that we shall not die of reality.

Life is not bad, and it doesn't look more real if it's ugly or it's gritty. Think of your own life. Most of what's in your own life, hopefully, is exactly that. Friendship and love and passion for movies and cartoons and comic books, whatever it is that you love. Most of the way we live our lives involves looking for pleasure and beauty and happiness and affection. Real artists don't use reflexive clichés about things. It's about honoring the reality of people's lives, which defies conventions and clichés and expectations. People are interesting, period.

Fiction is about everything human and we are made out of dust, and if you scorn getting yourself dusty, then you shouldn't try to write fiction. It's not a grand enough job for you.

Realism falls short of reality. It shrinks it, attenuates it, falsifies it; it does not take into account our basic truths and our fundamental obsessions: love, death, astonishment. It presents man in a reduced and estranged perspective. Truth is in our dreams, in the imagination.

God preserve us from writers who regurgitate what they have learnt from books! It is people's secrets we want to know - it is the natural history of the human heart that we have been trying to put down for a thousand years and everyone must and can leave their contribution.

Story is the oldest, commonest, most beloved, and most effective form of communication because our life is essentially a story. That's why the Bible is the most realistic of religious books. We can easily ignore or argue away abstractions, but we bump up against concretely real people, things, and events in story, as in life.

The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable.

In fact, people seem to be tired of fiction now. There are so many other ways of exploring humanity - by ethnology, psychoanalysis, and so on. It's a little boring to make up stories. So many people think that it's better to be very close to reality and to recount one's life as it is rather than to fictionalize, as they say, that is to transpose, and therefore to cheat.

In books, the proportion of exceptional to commonplace people is high; in reality, very low.

We have our Arts so we won't die of Truth.

Music is the reaching out towards the utmost realities by means of ordered sound.

We don’t read and write poetry because it’s cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race.

I do have the ability to explore life and to be over the moon at the smallest thing - a few pints and a craic in the pub and I'm in heaven. But I have a melancholy side to me as well. Acting allows me to feel things, it kind of buys me human experience. And I don't mean this as acting as higher cause, because it's not, but it does kind of have a higher awareness emotionally.

How will you know the difficulties of being human, if you are always flying off to blue perfection? Where will you plant your grief seeds? Workers need ground to scrape and hoe, not the sky of unspecified desire.

A book is a human fact; a great book like Seraphita gathers together numerous psychological elements. These elements become coherent through a sort of psychological beauty. It does the reader a service.

Let us answer a book of ink with a book of flesh and blood.

The real actor - like any real artistj- has a direct line to the collective heart.

THE NAME OF THE WIND has everything fantasy readers like, magic and mysteries and ancient evil, but it's also humorous and terrifying and completely believable. As with all the very best books in our field, it's not the fantasy trappings (wonderful as they are) that make this novel so good, but what the author has to say about true, common things, about ambition and failure, art, love, and loss.

A writer is a strange instrument of our species, a harp of sorts, fine-tuned to the dark contradictions of life.

...there would be punishment and pain, and there would be happiness, too. That was writing.