If you have the guts to be yourself, other people'll pay your price.
John UpdikeRead
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.
Interpretation
The quote suggests that a poet's true essence and thoughts are often constrained and cannot be fully expressed through their biography.
John Updike reflects on the limitations of a poet's biography, indicating that much of their inner life and creative spirit remains hidden behind the constraints of biography. While a few selected phrases and lines may convey some part of their artistic identity, the fullness of their experience and creativity cannot be fully captured or understood through mere biographical details.
In practice
In a literary discussion about the limitations of biographical interpretations of artists.
If you have the guts to be yourself, other people'll pay your price.
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.
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.
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.
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.
To guarantee the individual maximum freedom within a social frame of minimal laws ensures - if not happiness - its hopeful pursuit.
I despair about the lack of proper respect shown for the piano. If you want it to sound like a traffic jam, go out in the street and forget the piano. That's not a piano sound.
Opera singing is in every way of inestimable value; a real heritage for all mankind that has been reached over centuries of studies, attempts, flights of the spirit.
But I lie. I embellish. My words are not deep enough. They disguise, they conceal. I will not rest until I have told of my descent into a sensuality which was as dark, as magnificent, as wild, as my moments of mystic creation have been dazzling, ecstatic, exalted.
A film like Hoop Dreams is what the movies are for. It takes us, shakes us, and makes us think in new ways about the world around us. It gives us the impression of having touched life itself.
There's always a need at a critical time for poetry.
People ask me if I ever thought of writing a children's book. I say, 'If I had a serious brain injury I might well write a children's book', but otherwise the idea of being conscious of who you're directing the story to is anathema to me, because, in my view, fiction is freedom and any restraints on that are intolerable.
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