Narrative and metaphysics alike become flimsy and frivolous if they venture too far from the home base of all humanism - the single, simple human life that we all more or less lead, with its crude elementals of nurture and appetite, love and competition, the sunshine of well-being and the inevitable night of death. We each live this tale. Fiction has no reason to be embarrassed about telling the same story again and again, since we all, with infinite variations, experience the same story.
John UpdikeThere's a crystallization that goes on in a poem which the young man can bring off, but which the middle-aged man can't.
John UpdikeFiction is nothing less than the subtlest instrument for self-examination and self-display that Mankind has invented yet.
John Updike