Hugging the Shore Quotes

“I want to write books that unlock the traffic jam in everybody's head.”
― John Updike, Hugging the Shore: Essays and Criticism

“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.”
― John Updike, Hugging the Shore: Essays and Criticism

“Every novel, after all, invites us into a world that is, at first, strange; our gradual and selective orientation to its furniture and manners imitates the infant’s happy accommodations to his dawning environment.”
― John Updike, Hugging the Shore: Essays and Criticism