Catherine Drinker Bowen
Catherine Drinker Bowen
Catherine Drinker Bowenwas an American writer best known for her biographies. She won the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 1958...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth1 January 1897
CountryUnited States of America
writing kind
Writing is not apart from living. Writing is a kind of double living.
arrogance british tricks
There is a marvelous turn and trick to British arrogance; its apparent unconsciousness makes it twice as effectual.
healing writing realization
For your born writer, nothing is so healing as the realization that he has come upon the right word.
american-writer dare grown
I speak truth, not so much as I would, but as much as I dare; and I dare a little more, as I grown older.
writing reality thinking
Writing, I think, is not apart from living. Writing is a kind of double living. The writer experiences everything twice. Once in reality and once in that mirror which waits always before or behind.
needs empty
What the writer needs is an empty day ahead.
essence history mind
History is, in its essence, exciting; to present it as dull is, to my mind, stark and unforgivable misrepresentation.
want alive biographers
Biographers, by their very nature, want to know everything about everybody, dead or alive.
friendship conversation chamber-music
Chamber music - a conversation between friends.
work pioneers lighthouse
What pioneer ever had chart and a lighthouse to steer by?
writing artist people
One of the marks of true genius is a quality of abundance. A rich, rollicking abundance, enough to give indigestion to ordinary people. Great artists turn it out in rolls, in swatches. They cover whole ceilings with paintings, they chip out a mountainside in stone, they write not one novel but a shelf full. It follows that some of their work is better than other. As much as a third of it may be pretty bad. Shall we say this unevenness is the mark of their humanity - of their proud mortality as well as of their immortality?
music play sweat
your concert-goer, though he feed upon symphony as a lamb upon milk, is no true lover if he play no instrument. Your true lover does more than admire the muse; he sweats a little in her service.
adversity artist treasure
I have noted that, barring accidents, artists whose powers wear best and last longest are those who have trained themselves to work under adversity. Great artists treasure their time with a bitter and snarling miserliness.
thinking people soul
People who carry a musical soul about them are, I think, more receptive than others. They smile more readily. One feels in them a pleasant propensity toward the lesser sins, a pleasing readiness also to admit the possibility that on occasion they may be in the wrong--they may be mistaken.