Elizabeth Hardwick

Quotes

• “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.”
• “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.”
• “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.”
• “Sex, without society as its landscape, has never been of much interest to fiction.”
• “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.”
• “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.”

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Key dates

Born

27 July 1916

Died

2 December 2007

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Wikidata facts

Instance of

human

Given name

Elizabeth

Gender

female

Citizenship

United States

Place of birth

Lexington

Place of death

Manhattan

Spouse

Robert Lowell

Occupation

essayist

Educated at

Columbia University

Employer

Barnard College

Languages spoken

English language

Field of work

literary criticism

via Wikidata · CC0