I think ''taste'' is a social concept and not an artistic one. I'm willing to show good taste, if I can, in somebody else's living room, but our reading life is too short for a writer to be in any way polite. Since his words enter into another's brain in silence and intimacy, he should be as honest and explicit as we are with ourselves.
More Quotes from John Updike:
Bankruptcy is a sacred state, a condition beyond conditions, as theologians might say, and attempts to investigate it are necessarily obscene, like spiritualism. One knows only that he has passed into it and lives beyond us, in a condition not ours.John Updike
Looking foolish does the spirit good. The need not to look foolish is one of youth's many burdens as we get older we are exempted from more and more, and float upward in our heedlessness, singing Gratia Dei sum quod sum.
John Updike
I would especially like to recourt the Muse of poetry, who ran off with the mailman four years ago, and drops me only a scribbled postcard from time to time.
John Updike
Creativity is merely a plus name for regular activity. Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right, or better.
John Updike
The inner spaces that a good story lets us enter are the old apartments of religion.
John Updike
That a marriage ends is less than ideal; but all things end under heaven, and if temporality is held to be invalidating, then nothing real succeeds.
John Updike
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Based on Topics: Courtesy Quotes, Life Quotes, Sense & Perception Quotes, Silence QuotesI'm the only American alive or dead who presided unhappily over the removal of a vice president and a president.
Alexander Haig
You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children.
Madeleine LEngle
I'm really just a country boy.
Steven Tyler