John Updike quotes and sayings

Novelist | Born: March 18, 1932 - Died: January 27, 2009

John Updike motivational quote : My interest generally is the hidden Americans; the ones who live far away from the headlines.

All those little congruences and arabesques you prepared with such delicate anticipatory pleasure are gobbled up as if by pigs at a pastry cart.

My actinic keratosis is a result of the triumphalism of the beach. The sun exacerbates it.

What more fiendish proof of cosmic irresponsibility than a Nature which, having invented sex as a way to mix genes, then permits to arise, amid all its perfumed and hypnotic inducements to mate, a tireless tribe of spirochetes and viruses that torture and kill us for following orders?

As souls must cry when they awaken in tiny babies and find themselves far from heaven.

John Updike motivational quote : Life is a video game. No matter how good you get, you are always zapped in the end.

You do things and do things and nobody really has a clue.

Toni Morrison has a habit, perhaps traceable to the pernicious influence of William Faulkner, of plunging into the narrative before the reader has a clue to what is going on.

As I get older, my childhood self becomes more accessible to me, but selectively, in images as stylized and suspect as moments remembered from a novel read years ago.

Customs and convictions change; respectable people are the last to know, or to admit, the change, and the ones most offended by fresh reflections of the facts in the mirror of art.

I know how to choke. Given even a splinter-thin opportunity to let my side down and destroy my own score, I will seize it. Not only does ice water not run through my veins, but what runs there has a boiling point lower than body temperature.

The writer must face the fact that ordinary lives are what most people live most of the time, and that the novel as a narration of the fantastic and the adventurous is really an escapist plot; that aesthetically, the ordinary, the banal, is what you must deal with.

Gods don't answer letters.

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.

My life is, in a sense, trash. My life is only that of which the residue is my writing.

John Updike motivational quote : Tiger Woods did not always win majors with ease; after his narrow victory in the 1999 PGA, he slumped and sighed as if he'd been carrying rocks uphill all afternoon.

It's great to have an enemy. Sharpens your senses.

To be human is to be in the tense condition of a death-foreseeing, consciously libidinous animal. No other earthly creature suffers such a capacity for thought, such a complexity of envisioned but frustrated possibilities, such a troubling ability to question the tribal and biological imperatives.

Green grass, green grandstands, green concession stalls, green paper cups, green folding chairs and visors for sale, green and white ropes, green-topped Georgia pines. If justice were poetic, Hubert Green would win it every year.

My father provided; he gathered things to himself and let them fall upon the world; my clothes, my food, my luxurious hopes had fallen to me from him, and for the first time his death seemed, even at its immense stellar remove of impossibility, a grave and dreadful threat.

What other sport holds out hope of improvement to a man or a woman over fifty? True, the pros begin to falter at around forty, but it is their putting nerves that go, not their swings. For a duffer like me, the room for improvement is so vast that three lifetimes could be spent roaming the fiarways carving away at it, convinced that perfection lies just over the next rise. And that hope, perhaps, is the kindest bliss of all that golf bestows upon its devotees.

John Updike motivational quote : It's a man's world, they say; but in its daily textures it is a world created by and for women.

Money is like water in a leaky bucket: no sooner there, it begins to drip.

Bookstores are lonely forts, spilling light onto the sidewalk. They civilize their neighborhoods.

Families, doing everything for each other out of imagined obligation and always getting in each other's way, what a tangle.

My wife and I had children when we were children ourselves.

he is unlike the other customers. They sense it too, and look at him with hard eyes, eyes like little metal studs pinned into the white faces of young menIn the hush his entrance creates, the excessive courtesy the weary woman behind the counter shows him amplifies his strangeness. He orders coffee quietly and studies the rim of the cup to steady the sliding in his stomach. He had thought, he had read, that from shore to shore all America was the same. He wonders, Is it just these people I'm outside or is it all America?

How can the planet keep turning and turning and not get so bored it explodes?

All blessings are mixed blessings.

A Christian novelist tries to describe the world as it is.

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.

The breezes taste Of apple peel. The air is full Of smells to feel- Ripe fruit, old footballs, Burning brush, New books, erasers, Chalk, and such. The bee, his hive, Well-honeyed hum, And Mother cuts Chrysanthemums. Like plates washed clean With suds, the days Are polished with A morning haze.

Why does one never hear of government funding for the preservation and encouragement of comic strips, girlie magazines and TV soap operas? Because these genres still hold the audience they were created to amuse and instruct.

John Updike motivational quote : The New England spirit does not seek solutions in a crowd; raw light and solitariness are less dreaded than welcomed as enhancers of our essential selves.

Hobbies take place in the cellar and smell of airplane glue.

There's a crystallization that goes on in a poem which the young man can bring off, but which the middle-aged man can't.

The theme of old age doesn't seem to fascinate Hollywood.

Nature refuses to rest.

John Updike motivational quote : There was clearly great charm and worth in a sport so quaintly perverse in its basic instructions. Hit down to make the ball rise. Swing easy to make it go far. Finish high to make it go straight.

Until the 20th century it was generally assumed that a writer had said what he had to say in his works.

Those running tights the young women wear now, so they look like spacewomen, raspberry red and electric green so tight they show every muscle right into the crack between the buttocks, what is the point of them? Display. Young animals need to display.

Man is a means for turning things into spirit and turning spirit into things.

Appealingness is inversely proportional to attainability.

For some of us, books are intrinsic to our sense of personal identity.

A house, having been willfully purchased and furnished, tells us more than a body, and its description is a foremost resource of the art of fiction.

I have never liked haircuts.

The difference between a childhood and a boyhood must be this: our childhood is what we alone have had; our boyhood is what any boy in our environment would have had.

If men do not keep on speaking terms with children, they cease to be men, and become merely machines for eating and for earning money.

John Updike motivational quote : The literary scene is a kind of Medusa's raft, small and sinking, and one's instinct when a newcomer tries to clamber aboard is to step on his fingers.

Memories, impressions and emotions from the first 20 years on earth are most writers' main material; little that comes afterward is quite so rich and resonant.

There is a great deal of busywork to a writer's life, as to a professor's life, a great deal of work that matters only in that, if you don't do it, your desk becomes very full of papers. So, there is a lot of letter answering and a certain amount of speaking, though I try to keep that at a minimum.

Critics are like pigs at the pastry cart.

A person believes various things at various times, even on the same day.

John Updike motivational quote : The world ... is full of people who never knew what hit 'em, their lives are over before they wake up.

I've always tried to write about America. It's very worth a writer's effort.

A narrative is like a room on whose walls a number of false doors have been painted; while within the narrative, we have many apparent choices of exit, but when the author leads us to one particular door, we know it is the right one because it opens.

Journalism has not only its social stimulations but its aesthetic virtues. An invitation into print, from however suspect a source, is an opportunity to make something beautiful, to discover within oneself a treasure that would otherwise have remained buried.

It's not up to us what we learn, but merely whether we learn through joy or through pain.

I imagine most of that stuff on the information highway is roadkill anyway.

I think you remember certain phrases from bad reviews. You don't remember all the bad reviews.

The stripped and shapely Maple grieves The ghosts of her Departed leaves. The ground is hard, As hard as stone. The year is old, The birds are flown.

Sometimes it seems the whole purpose of pets is to bring death into the house.

I see no intrinsic reason why a doubly talented artist might not arise and create a comic-strip novel masterpiece.

John Updike motivational quote : I would rather be seated between any two women than any two men at a dinner party.

To guarantee the individual maximum freedom within a social frame of minimal laws ensures - if not happiness - its hopeful pursuit.

Every marriage tends to consist of an aristocrat and a peasant. Of a teacher and a learner.

Why does life feel, to us as we experience it, so desperately urgent and so utterly pointless at the same time?

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 motivational quote : In a country this large and a language even larger ... there ought to be a living for somebody who cares and wants to entertain and instruct a reader.

The lust to meet authors ranks low, I think, on the roll of holy appetites; but it is an authentic pang.

Billy Collins writes lovely poems. Limpid, gently and consistently startling, more serious than they seem, they describe all the worlds that are and were and some others besides.

History. The more of it you have the more you have to live it. After a little while there gets to be too much of it to memorize and maybe that's when empires start to decline.

Golf at its measured pace permits an electric excess of mental activity.

There are some women that don't do it for some men. That's why they turn out so many models.

Writing doesn't require drive. It's like saying a chicken has to have drive to lay an egg.

My only duty was to describe reality as it had come to me-to give the mundane its beautiful due.

Writing and rewriting are a constant search for what it is one is saying.

I must go to Nature disarmed of perspective and stretch myself like a large transparent canvas upon her in the hope that, my submission being perfect, the imprint of a beautiful and useful truth would be taken.

I know more about what it's like to be elderly and infirm and kind of stupid, the way you get forgetful, but on the other hand I'm a littler, wiser, dare we say? The word 'wisdom' has kind of faded out of our vocabulary, but yeah, I'm a little wiser.

John Updike motivational quote : Harvard has enough panegyrists without me.

I am sometimes visited by the heretical thought that there is no such thing as good and bad architecture, any more than there is good and bad nature. It is all in where you stand at the time.

I secretly understood: the primitive appeal of the hearth. Television is - its irresistible charm - a fire.

Phyllis explained to him, trying to give of her deeper self, 'Don't you find it so beautiful, math? Like an endless sheet of gold chains, each link locked into the one before it, the theorems and functions, one thing making the next inevitable. It's music, hanging there in the middle of space, meaning nothing but itself, and so moving...'.

We don't really want to think that the artist is only very skilled, that he has merely devoted his life to perfecting a certain set of intelligible skills.

John Updike motivational quote : I suppose sequels are inevitable for a writer of a certain age.

I didn't need to write historical epics, no, or science fiction, though I read a lot of science fiction as a kid and rather liked it. But I didn't have the mentality.

I seem most instinctively to believe in the human value of creative writing, whether in the form of verse or fiction, as a mode of truth-telling, self-expression and homage to the twin miracles of creation and consciousness.

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.

A lot of the Koran does not speak very eloquently to a Westerner. Much of it is either legalistic or opaquely poetic.

We were all brought up to want things and maybe the world isn't big enough for all that wanting. I don't know. I don't know anything.

A cynic is a kind of romantic who has aged.

The great thing about the dead, they make space.

The essence of government is concern for the widest possible public interest; the essence of the humanities, it seems to me, is private study, thought, and passion. Publicity is a essential to the one as privacy is to the other.

To be President of the United States, sir, is to act as advocate for a blind, venomous, and ungrateful client.

John Updike motivational quote : In no other sport must the spectator move.

The illusion is an agreement between the reader and writer that this story will be like life. The emotional temperature drops when you have footnotes.

Our tears fatten upon our memories of joy.

There is no such thing as static happiness. Happiness is a mixed thing, a thing compounded of sacrifices, and losses, and betrayals.

What we need is progress with an escape hatch.

John Updike motivational quote : Human was the music, natural was the static.

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John Updike quotes and sayings

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