If you have the guts to be yourself, other people'll pay your price.
John UpdikeRead
Until the 20th century it was generally assumed that a writer had said what he had to say in his works.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Writers were traditionally expected to express their thoughts fully in their published works.
John Updike's quote reflects the historical expectation that authors would convey all their ideas and understandings within their literary works. He suggests that before the 20th century, it was taken for granted that a writer's messages, insights, and philosophies would be contained within the pages of their books, without the need for supplementary commentary or explanation.
Themes
WritingLiteratureExpressionAuthorCommunication
In practice
Example use cases
In a discussion about literary analysis or the role of the author, this quote can illustrate how perceptions of writing have evolved.
More from John Updike
All quotes →Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that's the stuff life is made of. _x000D_ _x000D_ Suspect each moment, for it is a thief, tiptoeing away with more than it brings.
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Museums and bookstores should feel, I think, like vacant lots - places where the demands on us are our own demands, where the spirit can find exercise in unsupervised play.
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But it is just two lovers, holding hands and in a hurry to reach their car, their locked hands a starfish leaping through the dark.
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The reader knows the writer better than he knows himself; but the writer's physical presence is light from a star that has moved on.
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To guarantee the individual maximum freedom within a social frame of minimal laws ensures - if not happiness - its hopeful pursuit.
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Similar quotes
A man of letters, merely by reading a phrase, can estimate exactly the literary merit of its author.
Marcel ProustRead
It was a joy! Words weren't dull, words were things that could make your mind hum. If you read them and let yourself feel the magic, you could live without pain, with hope, no matter what happened to you.
Charles BukowskiRead
The distinction between literary and genre fiction is stupid and pernicious. It dates back to a feud between Robert Louis Stevenson and Henry James. James won, and it split literature into two streams. But it's a totally false dichotomy.
George R. R. MartinRead
The love of literature, of language, of the mystery of the mind and heart showing themselves in the minute, strange, and unexpected combinations of letters and words, in the blackest and coldest print—the love which he had hidden as if it were illicit and dangerous, he began to display, tentatively at first, and then boldly, and then proudly.
John Edward WilliamsRead
An author spends months writing a book, and maybe puts his heart's blood into it, and then it lies about unread till the reader has nothing else in the world to do.
W. Somerset MaughamRead
When we're done with it, we may find—if it's a good novel—that we're a bit different from what we were before we read it, that we have been changed a little, as if by having meet a new face, crossed a street we've never crossed before.
Ursula K. Le GuinRead