The story must spring from an impression or perception pressing enough to have made the writer write. It should magnetize the imagination and give pleasure.
Elizabeth BowenThe best that an individual can do is to concentrate on what he or she can do, in the course of a burning effort to do it better.
Elizabeth BowenRoughly, the action of a character should be unpredictable before it has been shown, inevitable when it has been shown. In the first half of a novel, the unpredictability should be the more striking. In the second half, the inevitability should be the more striking.
Elizabeth BowenLove of privacy - perhaps because of the increasing exactions of society - has become in many people almost pathological.
Elizabeth BowenDress has never been at all a straightforward business: so much subterranean interest and complex feeling attaches to it. As a topic ... it has a flowery head but deep roots in the passion. On the subject of dress almost no one, for one or another reason, feels truly indifferent: if their own clothes do not concern them, somebody else's do. ... Ten minutes talk about clothes (except between perfect friends) tends to make everyone present either overbearing, guarded or touchy.
Elizabeth Bowen