Elizabeth Hardwick: Fiction

Elizabeth Hardwick was Novelist, short story writer, literary critic. Explore interesting quotes on fiction.
Elizabeth Hardwick: 28 quotes0 likes

“They had created themselves together, and they always saw themselves, their youth, their love, their lost youth and lost love, their failures and memories, as a sort of living fiction.”

Elizabeth Hardwick

Source: Seduction and Betrayal: Women and Literature

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

Elizabeth Hardwick

Guilt, Character, Possibilities" (p. 235)
American Fictions (1999)

“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

"Guilt, Character, Possibilities" (p. 227)
American Fictions (1999)

“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

"Locations: An Introduction" (pp. xix-xx)
American Fictions (1999)

“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

"Locations: An Introduction" (p. xvi)
American Fictions (1999)