Quote #28
We hope the 'real' person behind the words will be revealed as ignominiously as a shapeless snail without its shapely shell.
More from John Updike
- 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.
- 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.
- I secretly understood: the primitive appeal of the hearth. Television is-its irresistible charm-a fire.
- 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…
- He skates saucily over great tracts of confessed ignorance.
- In asking forgiveness of women for our mythologizing of their bodies, for being unreal about them, we can only appeal to their own sexualit…
- 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.
- For male and female alike, the bodies of the other sex are messages signaling what we must do-they are glowing signifiers of our own necess…