Authors
John Updike Quotes
Best Quotes by John Updike (Top 10)
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It is easy to love people in memory; the hard thing is to love them when they are there in front of you.
John Updike -
Dreams come true; without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them.
John Updike -
Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face.
John Updike -
The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.
John Updike -
If you have the guts to be yourself, other people'll pay your price.
John Updike -
I want to write books that unlock the traffic jam in everybody's head.
John Updike -
What art offers is space - a certain breathing room for the spirit.
John Updike -
Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right or better.
John Updike -
Writers may be disreputable, incorrigible, early to decay or late to bloom but they dare to go it alone.
John Updike -
Looking foolish does the spirit good. The need not to look foolish is one of youth's many burdens; as we get older we are exempted from more and more.
John Updike
More John Updike Quotes
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The artist brings something into the world that didn't exist before, and he does it without destroying something else.
John Updike -
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 -
Being able to write becomes a kind of shield, a way of hiding, a way of too instantly transforming pain into honey.
John Updike -
A leader is one who, out of madness or goodness, volunteers to take upon himself the woe of the people. There are few men so foolish, hence the erratic quality of leadership in the world.
John Updike -
Being naked approaches being revolutionary; going barefoot is mere populism.
John Updike -
Rain is grace; rain is the sky descending to the earth; without rain, there would be no life.
John Updike -
Inspiration arrives as a packet of material to be delivered.
John Updike -
Sex is like money; only too much is enough.
John Updike -
Perfectionism is the enemy of creation, as extreme self- solitude is the enemy of well- being.
John Updike -
Existence itself does not feel horrible; it feels like an ecstasy, rather, which we have only to be still to experience.
John Updike -
The Founding Fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called an education.
John Updike -
Americans have been conditioned to respect newness, whatever it costs them.
John Updike -
I like old men. They can be wonderful bastards because they have nothing to lose. The only people who can be themselves are babies and old bastards.
John Updike -
People go around mourning the death of God; it's the death of sssin that bothers me. Without ssin, people aren't people any more, they're just ssoul-less sheep.
John Updike -
When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas.
John Updike -
The essential self is innocent, and when it tastes its own innocence knows that it lives for ever.
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Writers take words seriously-perha ps the last professional class that does-and they struggle to steer their own through the crosswinds of meddling editors and careless typesetters and obtuse and malevolent reviewers into the lap of the ideal reader.
John Updike -
The refusal to rest content, the willingness to risk excess on behalf of one's obsessions, is what distinguishes artists from entertainers, and what makes some artists adventurers on behalf of us all.
John Updike -
We are most alive when we're in love.
John Updike -
The difficulty with humorists is that they will mix what they believe with what they don't; whichever seems likelier to win an effect.
John Updike -
To say that war is madness is like saying that sex is madness: true enough, from the standpoint of a stateless eunuch, but merely a provocative epigram for those who must make their arrangements in the world as given.
John Updike -
Art is like baby shoes. When you coat them with gold, they can no longer be worn.
John Updike -
Critics are like pigs at the pastry cart.
John Updike -
Our brains are no longer conditioned for reverence and awe. We cannot imagine a Second Coming that would not be cut down to size by the televised evening news, or a Last Judgment not subject to pages of holier-than-thou second-guessing in The New York Review of Books.
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Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.
John Updike -
Creativity is merely a plus name for regular activity. Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right, or better.
John Updike -
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.
John Updike -
Four years was enough of Harvard. I still had a lot to learn, but had been given the liberating notion that now I could teach myself.
John Updike -
You cannot help but learn more as take the world into your hands. Take it up reverently, for it is and old piece of clay, with millions of thumbprints on it.
John Updike -
Life is like an overlong drama through which we sit being nagged by the vague memories of having read the reviews.
John Updike -
One of the cool, chaste countries - Canada or Sweden.
John Updike -
The essential support and encouragement comes from within, arising out of the mad notion that your society needs to know what only you can tell it.
John Updike -
Golf appeals to the idiot in us and the child. Just how childlike golf players become is proven by their frequent inability to count past five.
John Updike -
Many men are more faithful to their golf partners than to their wives and have stuck with them longer.
John Updike -
A healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people's patience.
John Updike -
Every marriage tends to consist of an aristocrat and a peasant. Of a teacher and a learner.
John Updike