Elizabeth Hardwick

“The greatest gift is a passion for reading.”

“Pain is instructive.”

“New York is a city of conversations overheard, of people imagining themselves according to other people's ideas.”

“There are people who can do all fine and heroic things but one - keep from telling their happiness to the unhappy.”

“In the end, what is a normal life? It is what you do when you are not dreaming.”

“What is a home? It is a place where you are understood.”

“Writers, and particularly poets, are particularly prone to madness.”

“Perhaps the old view of spinsterhood as a blight and a misfortune is, in fact, a useful one, since it encourages the woman to make something of her own life.”

“I don't think you can be a good writer unless you are a good reader.”

“Sometimes I have given myself a rule: write only what you can’t say.”

“A city is a place where there is no need to wait for next week to get the answer to a question, to taste the food of any country, to find new voices to listen to and familiar ones to listen to again.”

“The personal is not political. It is simply personal.”

“The tolerance of the public is the greatest of all virtues.”