Elizabeth Hardwick Quotes

42 Sourced Quotes

Biography is a scrofulous cottage industry, done mostly by academics who get grants and have a good time going all over the place interviewing. How seldom it is that one has ever heard of the person writing the biography.

Elizabeth Hardwick
We would not want to think of the essay as the country of old men, but it is doubtful that the slithery form, wearisomely vague and as chancy as trying to catch a fish in the open hand, can be taught.

Elizabeth Hardwick
As we know from the Old Testament it is very easy to sink into idolatry, which a good deal of the flag-waving is just now.

Elizabeth Hardwick
Boston — wrinkled, spindly-legged, depleted of nearly all her spiritual and cutaneous oils, provincial, self-esteeming — has gone on spending and spending her inflated bills of pure reputation, decade after decade.

Elizabeth Hardwick
This photographer felt deeply the stab of professional insult common to people who have lived in a foreign country for a few years and still find their opinions not asked for at home.

Elizabeth Hardwick
Manhattan is not altogether felicitous for fiction. It is not a city of memory, not a family city, not the capital of America so much as the iconic capital of this century. It is grand and grandiose with its two rivers acting as a border to contain the restless. Its skyscrapers and bleak, rotting tenements are a gift for photographic consumption, but for the fictional imagination the city's inchoate density is a special challenge.

Elizabeth Hardwick
This is the unspoken contract of a wife and her works. In the long run wives are to be paid in a peculiar coin — consideration for their feelings. And it usually turns out this is an enormous, unthinkable inflation few men will remit, or if they will, only with a sense of being overcharged.

Elizabeth Hardwick
Of course these things are not mine. I think they are usually spoken of as ours, that tea bag of a word which steeps in the conditional.

Elizabeth Hardwick
I think the fundamentalists' and Reagan's use of religion is an appalling blasphemy. The idea that God wants a strong America. Many Americans will naturally want a strong America, but I don't know that God is in agreement. I hadn't thought of Him as being a patriot.

Elizabeth Hardwick
I have come to the belief that there is not merely an accidental relationship between bad writing and routine sociological research, but a wonderfully pure, integral relationship; the awkwardness is necessary and inevitable.

Elizabeth Hardwick
How certain human beings are able to create works of art is a mystery, and why they should wish to do so, at a great cost to themselves usually, is another mystery. Works are not created by one's life; every life is rich in material.

Elizabeth Hardwick
The laughter of adults was always very different from the laughter of children. The former indicated a recognition of the familiar, but in children it came from the shock of the new.

Elizabeth Hardwick
There's a leveling homogeneity in America today created by television. Each day it passes over the vast land mass, over the states nudging each other like the sovereignties of the Balkans, creating a unifying cloud of aesthetic properties and experience. East and West, North and South are wrapped in a sort of over-soul of images, facts, happenings, celebrities. This debris is as sacred to our current fiction as gossip about the new vicar was to Trollope. And there it is on the page, informing the domestically restless households, father off somewhere, mother chagrined. Sons and daughters writing the books.

Elizabeth Hardwick
Gertrude Stein, all courage and will, is a soldier of minimalism. Her work, unlike the resonating silences in the art of Samuel Beckett, embodies in its loquacity and verbosity the curious paradox of the minimalist form. This art of the nuance in repetition and placement she shares with the orchestral compositions of Philip Glass.

Elizabeth Hardwick
The private and serious drama of guilt is not often a useful one for fiction today and its disappearance, following perhaps the disappearance from life, appears as a natural, almost unnoticed relief, like some of the challenging illnesses wiped out by drug and vaccines.

Elizabeth Hardwick
Since films and television have staged everything imaginable before it happens, a true event, taking place in the real world, brings to mind the landscape of films.

Elizabeth Hardwick
Flattery is a challenge. The proper turning away from it, undercutting, diminishing it without offense or vehemence, is a social grace sweeter even than the swift determination to keep ahead in the race of hospitality.

Elizabeth Hardwick
Here in the city the worst thing that can happen to a nation has happened: we are a people afraid of its youth.

Elizabeth Hardwick
The famous carry about with them a great weight of patriarchal baggage-the footnotes of their lives.

Elizabeth Hardwick
Sex can no longer be the germ, the seed of fiction. Sex is an episode, most properly conveyed in an episodic manner, quickly, often ironically. It is a bursting forth of only one of the cells in the body of the omnipotent I, the one who hopes by concentration of tone and voice to utter the sound of reality.

Elizabeth Hardwick
The future may be an enemy. Time can turn happy days and nights into nothing.

Elizabeth Hardwick
I'm not sure I understand the process of writing. There is, I'm sure, something strange about imaginative concentration. The brain slowly begins to function in a different way, to make mysterious connections.

Elizabeth Hardwick
As for evangelizing Christians, their vulgarization of the Scriptures surpasses belief, their incredible assumption of Jesus as a pal in the cheering stand.

Elizabeth Hardwick
The fifties – they seem to have taken place on a sunny afternoon that asked nothing of you except a drifting belief in the moment and its power to satisfy.

Elizabeth Hardwick
Writing is not "the establishment of a professional reputation" as if one were a doctor or lawyer; it is not properly in the sentence with creation of a family and the purchase of a home.

Elizabeth Hardwick
I hardly ever go into a bookstore because, instead of buying, I would like to give away about five thousand of my seven thousand books, which are weighing on me like some suffocating plague.

Elizabeth Hardwick
She was alone in the way that one can only be when pain is involved.

Elizabeth Hardwick
History... with its long, leisurely, gentlemanly labors, the books arriving by post, the cards to be kept and filed, the sections to be copied, the documents to be checked, is the ideal pursuit for the New England mind.

Elizabeth Hardwick
I don't have many plots and perhaps as a justification I sometimes think: If I want a plot I'll watch Dallas.

Elizabeth Hardwick
Biographers, the quick in pursuit of the dead, research, organize, fill in, contradict, and make in this way a sort of completed picture puzzle with all the scramble turned into a blue eye and the parts of the right leg fitted together.

Elizabeth Hardwick