A Quote by Nicholson Baker

Updike was the first to take the penile sensorium under the wing of elaborate metaphorical prose.

Nicholson Baker

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Elaborate First Metaphorical Prose Take Wing

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Nicholson Baker
American - Novelist
Born: January 7, 1957

I would say that the writers I like and trust have at the base of their prose something called the English sentence. An awful lot of modern writing seems to me to be a depressed use of language. Once, I called it "vow-of-poverty prose." No, give me the king in his countinghouse. Give me Updike.

Martin Amis

With impeccable prose, dry wit, and uncommon wisdom, Ted Thompson brings to life one family's painful disappointments and powerful resilience. The Land of Steady Habits combines Austen's shrewd mastery of domestic economics with Updike's compassion for the melancholy commuter to make something elegant, fresh, and brilliant.

Maggie Shipstead

John Updike's first published book was a collection of poems.

Jonathan Galassi

An old essay by John Updike begins, 'We live in an era of gratuitous inventions and negative improvements.' That language is general and abstract, near the top of the ladder. It provokes our thinking, but what concrete evidence leads Updike to his conclusion ? The answer is in his second sentence : 'Consider the beer can.' To be even more specific, Updike was complaining that the invention of the pop-top ruined the aesthetic experience of drinking beer. 'Pop-top' and 'beer' are at the bottom of the ladder, 'aesthetic experience' at the top.

John Updike

Poetry has an indirect way of hinting at things. Poetry is feminine. Prose is masculine. Prose, the very structure of it, is logical; poetry is basically illogical. Prose has to be clear-cut; poetry has to be vague - that's its beauty, its quality. Prose simply says what it says; poetry says many things. Prose is needed in the day-to-day world, in the marketplace. But whenever something of the heart has to be said, prose is always found inadequate - one has to fall back to poetry.

Rajneesh

I kissed John Updike as he presented me with an award. It wasn't the best kiss as far as kisses go, but I hold the fact that I kissed John Updike, that he kissed me, very close to my heart.

Ann Patchett

I've already written 300 space poems. But I look upon my ultimate form as being a poetic prose. When you read it, it appears to be prose, but within the prose you have embedded the techniques of poetry.

Story Musgrave

Sad to think that we won't have any new stories from John Updike, one of the last century's masters. But so many here in the two volumes of his collected stories, 186 by my count, stories to read, reread, savor over the course of a cold season. Updike's genius in the short form spills out of these many, many pages.

Alan Cheuse

There is poetry even in prose, in all the great prose which is not merely utilitarian or didactic: there exist poets who write in prose or at least in more or less apparent prose; millions of poets write verses which have no connection with poetry.

Eugenio Montale

A prose writer gets tired of writing prose, and wants to be a poet. So he begins every line with a capital letter, and keeps on writing prose.

Samuel McChord Crothers

My first book was poetry, but I didn't write it first. I wrote it third. So my first two books were prose.

Tao Lin

That prose is a verse, and verse is a prose; convincing all, by demonstrating plain – poetic souls delight in prose insane

Lord Byron

I'm not left-wing, or right-wing. With only one wing I couldn't fly, and I just couldn't have that.

Dennis Sharp

I'd rather call prose poems something else, for clarity - something like "poetic prose," prose that contains a quality of poetry, but not poems.

Pattiann Rogers

I put my energy, voice, and spirit into fighting for anybody who wants to speak their voice. I don't care what the right wing, the left wing, or the chicken wing has to say.

Donna Brazile

Living, as I do, in an educated and scientific atmosphere, I could not have conceived that the first principles of zoology were so little known. Is it possible that you do not know the elementary fact in comparative anatomy, that the wing of a bird is really the forearm, while the wing of a bat consists of three elongated fingers with membranes between?

Arthur Conan Doyle

A Quote by Nicholson Baker

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