Quote #30
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 being a cretin. Or a politician.
More from John Updike
- 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.
- In asking forgiveness of women for our mythologizing of their bodies, for being unreal about them, we can only appeal to their own sexualit…
- We hope the 'real' person behind the words will be revealed as ignominiously as a shapeless snail without its shapely shell.
- 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…
- 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.
- Customs and convictions change; respectable people are the last to know, or to admit, the change, and the ones most offended by fresh refle…
- I secretly understood: the primitive appeal of the hearth. Television is-its irresistible charm-a fire.
- Now that I am sixty, I see why the idea of elder wisdom has passed from currency.