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 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.
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?
writing kind
Writing is not apart from living. Writing is a kind of double living.
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.
healing writing realization
For your born writer, nothing is so healing as the realization that he has come upon the right word.
arrogance british tricks
There is a marvelous turn and trick to British arrogance; its apparent unconsciousness makes it twice as effectual.
art vision purpose
If art has a purpose, it is to interpret life, reproduce it in fresh visions.
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.
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.
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.