Quote #27

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.

More from John Updike

  1. I secretly understood: the primitive appeal of the hearth. Television is-its irresistible charm-a fire.
  2. We hope the 'real' person behind the words will be revealed as ignominiously as a shapeless snail without its shapely shell.
  3. He skates saucily over great tracts of confessed ignorance.
  4. 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.
  5. 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.
  6. 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…
  7. 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 …
  8. In asking forgiveness of women for our mythologizing of their bodies, for being unreal about them, we can only appeal to their own sexualit…

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