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 choices of exit, but when the author leads us to one particular door, we know it is the right one because it opens.
More Quotes from John Updike:
When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas.John Updike
Boys are playing basketball around a telephone pole with a backboard bolted to it.
John Updike
Vagueness and procrastination are ever a comfort to the frail in spirit.
John Updike
The creative writer uses his life as well as being its victim he can control, in his work, the self-presentation that in actuality is at the mercy of a thousand accidents.
John Updike
A healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people's patience.
John Updike
What more fiendish proof of cosmic irresponsibility than a Nature which, having invented sex as a way to mix genes, then permits to arise, amid all its perfumed and hypnotic inducements to mate, a tireless tribe of spirochetes and viruses that torture and kill us for following orders
John Updike
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