Quote #21

The inner spaces that a good story lets us enter are the old apartments of religion.

More from John Updike

  1. A narrative is like a room on whose walls a number of false doors have been painted; while within the narrative, we have many apparent choi…
  2. Her sentences march under a harsh sun that bleaches color from them but bestows a peculiar, invigorating, Pascalian clarity.
  3. Bankruptcy is a sacred state, a condition beyond conditions, as theologians might say, and attempts to investigate it are necessarily obsce…
  4. He had a sensation of anxiety and shame, a sensitivity acute beyond usefulness, as if the nervous system, flayed of its old hide of social …
  5. Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.
  6. But for a few phrases from his letters and an odd line or two of his verse, the poet walks gagged through his own biography.
  7. Writers may be disreputable, incorrigible, early to decay or late to bloom but they dare to go it alone.
  8. He skates saucily over great tracts of confessed ignorance.

All John Updike quotes