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"If a theme or idea is too near the surface, the novel becomes simply a tract illustrating an idea."
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Exlpore more Creativity quotes
"Writing the same kind of material is no guarantee you'll be working from the same ethos so that writers from different fields are just as likely to have an understanding of each other's work as someone working in the same genre."
"It does not need to be perfect - or technically correct - to be magic."
"Then may I tell you that the very next words I read were these - 'Chloe liked Olivia'. Do not start. Do not blush. Let us admit in the privacy of our own society that these things sometimes happen. Sometimes women do like women."
"For me the experience of writing is really an experience of losing control. I think it's very much like dreaming or like surfing. You go out there and wait for a wave, and when it comes it takes you somewhere and you don't know where it'll go."
"If you you write with enough assurance and confidence, you're allowed to do whatever you like. So write your story as it needs to be written. Write it honestly, and tell it as best you can."
"Then I realized the vital necessity of art. Human life, yes, you nurse people, you clean house, you market, but then comes the moment of solace and flight. i sit and write and summon other friends, other forms of life, other experiences, and the voyage and the exploration, the delving into character, the vast expanse of life's possibilities and potentialities, contemplation of future travels, of dazzling friendships, all this then makes the chores and the sacrifices beautiful because they are diverted toward some beautiful aim, they become part of the structure of a work of art."
"Often the inspiration to write music comes from the voices in your head. You're not crazy. Just be thankful they are not making you rescue people in 20-degree weather at 2:30 in the morning in the forest."
"The idea really came to me the day I got my new false teeth."
"It is the function of art to renew our perception. What we are familiar with we cease to see. The writer shakes up the familiar scene, and, as if by magic, we see a new meaning in it."
"I like working among 'creative clutter'. It gives me a sense of activity and achievement."
Explore more quotes by Elizabeth Bowen
"The innocent are so few that two of them seldom meet - when they do meet, their victims lie strewn all round."
"Experience isn't interesting until it begins to repeat itself. In fact, till it does that, it hardly is experience."
"Intimacies between women often go backwards, beginning in revelations and ending in small talk."
"The importance to the writer of first writing must be out of all proportion of the actual value of what is written."
"Meeting people unlike oneself does not enlarge one's outlook; it only confirms one's idea that one is unique."
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