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Current counts: Authors: 8,146. Quotations: 38,970
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| John Updike
A healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people's patience. 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. America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy. Boys are playing basketball around a telephone pole with a backboard bolted to it. 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. Dreams come true; without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them. 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. 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 usage, must record every touch of pain. Her sentences march under a harsh sun that bleaches color from them but bestows a peculiar, invigorating, Pascalian clarity. 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. Inspiration arrives as a packet of material to be delivered. It was one of history's great love stories, the mutually profitable romance which Hollywood and bohunk America conducted almost in the dark, a tapping of fervent messages through the wall of the San Gabriel Range. 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. The inner spaces that a good story lets us enter are the old apartments of religion. 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. Until the 20th century it was generally assumed that a writer had said what he had to say in his works. We hope the real person behind the words will be revealed as ignominiously as a shapeless snail without its shapely shell. We take our bearings, daily, from others. To be sane is, to a great extent, to be sociable. When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas. |
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