Quote #24

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.

More from John Updike

  1. 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 …
  2. He skates saucily over great tracts of confessed ignorance.
  3. Her sentences march under a harsh sun that bleaches color from them but bestows a peculiar, invigorating, Pascalian clarity.
  4. I secretly understood: the primitive appeal of the hearth. Television is-its irresistible charm-a fire.
  5. The inner spaces that a good story lets us enter are the old apartments of religion.
  6. There's a crystallization that goes on in a poem which the young man can bring off, but which the middle-aged man can't.
  7. 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…
  8. We hope the 'real' person behind the words will be revealed as ignominiously as a shapeless snail without its shapely shell.

All John Updike quotes