Education is not so important as people think.
— Elizabeth Bowen
The importance to the writer of first writing must be out of all proportion of the actual value of what is written.
The 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.
The wish to lead out one's lover must be a tribal feeling; the wish to be seen as loved is part of one's self-respect.
Mechanical difficulties with language are the outcome of internal difficulties with thought.
Pity the selfishness of lovers: it is brief, a forlorn hope; it is impossible.
Jealousy is no more than feeling alone against smiling enemies.
Silences have a climax, when you have got to speak.
All your youth you want to have your greatness taken for granted; when you find it taken for granted, you are unnerved.
We are minor in everything but our passions.
Nobody speaks the truth when there is something they must have.
The heart may think it knows better: the senses know that absence blots people out. We really have no absent friends.
No object is mysterious. The mystery is your eye.
If a theme or idea is too near the surface, the novel becomes simply a tract illustrating an idea.
Ireland is a great country to die or be married in.
I became, and remain, my characters' close and intent watcher: their director, never. Their creator I cannot feel that I was, or am.
Meeting people unlike oneself does not enlarge one's outlook; it only confirms one's idea that one is unique.
That is partly why women marry - to keep up the fiction of being in the hub of things.
Autumn arrives in early morning, but spring at the close of a winter day.
If you look at life one way, there is always cause for alarm.
Language is a mixture of statement and evocation.
Nobody can be kinder than the narcissist while you react to life in his own terms.
Intimacies between women often go backwards, beginning in revelations and ending in small talk.
Art is one thing that can go on mattering once it has stopped hurting.
There is no end to the violations committed by children on children, quietly talking alone.
Fantasy is toxic: the private cruelty and the world war both have their start in the heated brain.
Nothing can happen nowhere. The locale of the happening always colours the happening, and often, to a degree, shapes it.
I think the main thing, don't you, is to keep the show on the road.
The innocent are so few that two of them seldom meet - when they do meet, their victims lie strewn all round.
Illusions are art, for the feeling person, and it is by art that we live, if we do.
Never to lie is to have no lock on your door, you are never wholly alone.
One can live in the shadow of an idea without grasping it.
Who is ever adequate? We all create situations each other can't live up to, then break our hearts at them because they don't.
Experience isn't interesting until it begins to repeat itself. In fact, till it does that, it hardly is experience.
When you love someone all your saved up wishes start coming out.
It is not helpful to help a friend by putting coins in his pockets when he has got holes in his pockets.
Fate is not an eagle, it creeps like a rat.
