Catherine Drinker Bowen Quotes

“Writers seldom choose as friends those self-centered characters who are never in trouble, never make mistakes, and always count their change as it is handed to them.”

— Catherine Drinker Bowen

“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.”

— Catherine Drinker Bowen

“Writing is not apart from living. Writing is a kind of double living.”

— Catherine Drinker Bowen

“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.”

— Catherine Drinker Bowen

For your born writer, nothing is so healing as the realization that he has come upon the right word.

— Catherine Drinker Bowen

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.

— Catherine Drinker Bowen

“Colonial America had looked upon (lawyers) as mere tradesmen who earned a questionable living by cleverness and chicanery.”

— Catherine Drinker Bowen

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.

— Catherine Drinker Bowen

There is a marvelous turn and trick to British arrogance; its apparent unconsciousness makes it twice as effectual.

— Catherine Drinker Bowen

“Will the reader turn the page?”

— Catherine Drinker Bowen

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.

— Catherine Drinker Bowen

“If art has a purpose, it is to interpret life, reproduce it in fresh visions.”

— Catherine Drinker Bowen

“Many a man who has known himself at ten forgets himself utterly between ten and thirty.”

— Catherine Drinker Bowen

“What the writer needs is an empty day ahead.”

— Catherine Drinker Bowen

“History is, in its essence, exciting; to present it as dull is, to my mind, stark and unforgivable misrepresentation.”

— Catherine Drinker Bowen

“Biographers, by their very nature, want to know everything about everybody, dead or alive.”

— Catherine Drinker Bowen

“What pioneer ever had chart and a lighthouse to steer by?”

— Catherine Drinker Bowen

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.

— Catherine Drinker Bowen

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.

— Catherine Drinker Bowen

Artists often think they are going to die before their time. They seem to possess a heightened sense of the passing of the hours.

— Catherine Drinker Bowen

“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?”

— Catherine Drinker Bowen

“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.”

— Catherine Drinker Bowen

“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.”

— Catherine Drinker Bowen

“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.”

— Catherine Drinker Bowen