Quote #26

I secretly understood: the primitive appeal of the hearth. Television is-its irresistible charm-a fire.

More from John Updike

  1. He skates saucily over great tracts of confessed ignorance.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. We hope the 'real' person behind the words will be revealed as ignominiously as a shapeless snail without its shapely shell.
  5. 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 …
  6. Four years was enough of Harvard. I still had a lot to learn, but had been given the liberating notion that now I could teach myself.
  7. Her sentences march under a harsh sun that bleaches color from them but bestows a peculiar, invigorating, Pascalian clarity.
  8. It rots a writer's brain, it cretinises you. You say the same thing again and again, and when you do that happily you're well on the way to…

All John Updike quotes