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
art vision purpose
If art has a purpose, it is to interpret life, reproduce it in fresh visions.
arrogance british tricks
There is a marvelous turn and trick to British arrogance; its apparent unconsciousness makes it twice as effectual.
artist treasure bitterness
Great artists treasure their time with a bitter and snarling miserliness.
heart guests may
It is a great, a pleasant thing to have a friend with whom to walk, untroubled, through the woods, by the stream, saying nothing, at peace--the heart all clean and quiet and empty, ready for the spirit that may choose to be its guest.
mistake eye giving
In early days, I tried not to give librarians any trouble, which was where I made my primary mistake. Librarians like to be given trouble; they exist for it, they are geared to it. For the location of a mislaid volume, an uncatalogued item, your good librarian has a ferret’s nose. Give her a scent and she jumps the leash, her eye bright with battle.
writing black fiction
In writing biography, fact and fiction shouldn't be mixed. And if they are, the fictional points should be printed in red ink, the facts printed in black ink.
music lonely art
All the others arts are lonely. We paint alone--my picture, my interpretation of the sky. My poem, my novel. But in music--ensemble music, not soloism--we share. No altruism this, for we receive tenfold what we give.
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.
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?
thinking artist hours
Artists often think they are going to die before their time. They seem to possess a heightened sense of the passing of the hours.
women eight careers
A woman's biography - with about eight famous historical exceptions - so often turns out to be the story of a man and the woman who helped his career.
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.
work pioneers lighthouse
What pioneer ever had chart and a lighthouse to steer by?