Catherine Drinker Bowen Quotes
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What pioneer ever had chart and a lighthouse to steer by?
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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.
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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.
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There is a marvelous turn and trick to British arrogance; its apparent unconsciousness makes it twice as effectual.
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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.
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Writing is not apart from living. Writing is a kind of double living.
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Many a man who has known himself at ten forgets himself utterly between ten and thirty.
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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.
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If art has a purpose, it is to interpret life, reproduce it in fresh visions.
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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.
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Writers seldom choose as friends those self-contained characters who are never in trouble, never unhappy or ill, never make mistakes, and always count their change when it is handed to them.
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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.
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Biographers, by their very nature, want to know everything about everybody, dead or alive.
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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?
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Will the reader turn the page?
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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.
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History is, in its essence, exciting; to present it as dull is, to my mind, stark and unforgivable misrepresentation.
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What the writer needs is an empty day ahead.
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Artists often think they are going to die before their time. They seem to possess a heightened sense of the passing of the hours.
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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.
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For your born writer, nothing is so healing as the realization that he has come upon the right word.
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Chamber music - a conversation between friends.
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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.
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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.