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John Updike - From the Accidents category:
The creative writer uses his life as well as being its victim; he can control, in his work, the self-presentation that in actuality is at the mercy of a thousand accidents. (John Updike)
John Updike - From the Achievement category:
- Rabbit, Run
After you're first-rate at something, no matter what, it kind of takes the kick out of being second-rate. (John Updike)
John Updike - From the Activity category:
Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right, or better. (John Updike)
John Updike - From the Adventure category:
You always find things you didn't know you were going to say, and that is the adventure... (John Updike)
John Updike - From the Aging category:
Now that I am sixty, I see why the idea of elder wisdom has passed from currency. (John Updike)
John Updike - From the Aging category:
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. (John Updike)
John Updike - From the Anxiety category:
-on Franz Kafka...
He had a sensation of anxiety and shame, a sensitivity acute beyond usefulness, as if the nervous system, flayed of its old hide of social usage, must record every touch of pain. (John Updike)
John Updike - From the Art category:
Art is like baby shoes. When you coat them with gold, they can no longer be worn. (John Updike)
John Updike - From the Artists category:
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)
John Updike - From the Authority category:
Every marriage tends to consist of an aristocrat and a peasant. Of a teacher and a learner. (John Updike)
John Updike - From the Beauty category:
Natural beauty is essentially temporary and sad; hence the impression of obscene mockery which artificial flowers give us. (John Updike)
John Updike - From the Beginning category:
Each morning my characters greet me with misty faces willing, though chilled, to muster for another day's progress through the dazzling quicksand, the marsh of blank paper. (John Updike)
John Updike - From the Beginning category:
Swallow a toad in the morning and you will encounter nothing more disgusting the rest of the day. (John Updike)
John Updike - From the Belief category:
When we try in good faith to believe in materialism, in the exclusive reality of the physical, we are asking our selves to step aside; we are disavowing the very realm where we exist and where all things precious are kept - the realm of emotion and conscience, of memory and intention and sensation. (John Updike)
John Updike - From the Books category:
The moment when the finished book or, better yet, a tightly packed carton of finished books arrives on my doorstep is the moment of truth, of culmination; its bliss lasts as much as five minutes, until the first typographical error or production flaw is noticed. (John Updike)
John Updike - From the Boredom category:
A healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people's patience. (John Updike)
John Updike - From the Change category:
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. (John Updike)
John Updike - From the Children category:
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)
John Updike - From the Collaboration category:
By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved. (John Updike)
John Updike - From the Communication category:
Until the 20th century it was generally assumed that a writer had said what he had to say in his works. (John Updike)
John Updike - From the Creativity category:
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)
John Updike - From the Criticism category:
Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea. (John Updike)
John Updike - From the Critics category:
Critics are like pigs at the pastry cart. (John Updike)
John Updike - From the Deception category:
It is not difficult to deceive the first time, for the deceived possesses no antibodies; unvaccinated by suspicion, she overlooks latenesses, accepts absurd excuses, permits the flimsiest patchings to repair great rents in the quotidian. (John Updike)
John Updike - From the Discovery category:
From infancy on, we are all spies; the shame is not this but that the secrets to be discovered are so paltry and few. (John Updike)
John Updike - From the Dreams category:
Dreams come true; without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them. (John Updike)
John Updike - From the Earth category:
You cannot help but learn more as you take the world into your hands. Take it up reverently, for it is an old piece of clay, with millions of thumbprints on it. (John Updike)
John Updike - From the Editing category:
Writing and rewriting are a constant search for what it is one is saying. (John Updike)
John Updike - From the Emotion category:
Existence itself does not feel horrible; it feels like an ecstasy, rather, which we have only to be still to experience. (John Updike)
John Updike - From the Encouragement category:
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)
John Updike - From the Eroticism category:
For male and female alike, the bodies of the other sex are messages signaling what we must do, they are glowing signifiers of our own necessities. (John Updike)
John Updike - From the Fame category:
Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face. As soon as one is aware of being somebody, to be watched and listened to with extra interest, input ceases, and the performer goes blind and deaf in his over-animation. One can either see or be seen. (John Updike)
John Updike - From the Fear category:
There is advantage in the wisdom won from pain. (John Updike)
John Updike - From the Finishing category:
I can't bear to finish things, beyond a certain point they get heavy. There's something so dead about a finished painting. (John Updike)
John Updike - From the Fire category:
-on a child doing homework near the family's television set...
I secretly understood: the primitive appeal of the hearth. Television is - its irresistible charm - a fire. (John Updike)
John Updike - From the Freedom category:
Freedom, that he always thought was outward motion, turns out to be this inward dwindling. (John Updike)
John Updike - From the Friendship category:
We take our bearings, daily, from others. To be sane is, to a great extent, to be sociable. (John Updike)
John Updike - From the Gender category:
How do you write women so well? I think of a man and I take away reason and accountability. (John Updike)
John Updike - From the Grace category:
Rain is grace; rain is the sky condescending to the earth; without rain, there would be no life. (John Updike)
John Updike - From the Guidance category:
Do what the heart commands. The heart is our only guide. (John Updike)
John Updike - From the Happiness category:
America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy. (John Updike)
John Updike - From the Health category:
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? (John Updike)
John Updike - From the Humour category:
Is not the decisive difference between comedy and tragedy that tragedy denies us another chance? (John Updike)
John Updike - From the Immortality category:
The yearning for an afterlife is the opposite of selfish: it is love and praise for the world that we are privileged, in this complex interval of light, to witness and experience. (John Updike)
John Updike - From the Information category:
Yes, there is a ton of information on the Web, but much of it is egregiously inaccurate, unedited, unattributed and juvenile. (John Updike)
John Updike - From the Innocence category:
The essential self is innocent, and when it tastes its own innocence knows that it lives for ever. (John Updike)
John Updike - From the Inspiration category:
Inspiration arrives as a packet of material to be delivered. (John Updike)
John Updike - From the Invention category:
The artist brings something into the world that didn't exist before, and he does it without destroying something else. A kind of refutation of the conservation of matter. (John Updike)
John Updike - From the Leadership category:
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)
John Updike - From the Life category:
Life is like an overlong drama through which we sit being nagged by the vague memories of having read the reviews. (John Updike)
John Updike - From the Life category:
Life is a nacho. It can be yummy-crunchy or squishy-yucky. It just depends on how long it takes for you to start eating it. (John Updike)
John Updike - From the Love category:
We are most alive when we're in love. (John Updike)
John Updike - From the Masters category:
The ghosts of Hawthorne and Melville still sit on those green hills. The worship of Mammon is also somewhat lessened there by the spirit of irony. (John Updike)
John Updike - From the Money category:
Sex is like money; only too much is enough. (John Updike)
John Updike - From the Muse category:
I would especially like to re-court the Muse of poetry, who ran off with the mailman four years ago, and drops me only a scribbled postcard from time to time. (John Updike)
John Updike - From the Music category:
-from James Gleik's CHAOS...
The music was human; the static was natural. (John Updike)
John Updike - From the Nature category:
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. (John Updike)
John Updike - From the Nudes category:
-On the Vineyard
Being naked approaches being revolutionary; going barefoot is mere populism. (John Updike)
John Updike - From the Peace category:
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)
John Updike - From the Perfection category:
Perfectionism is the enemy of creation, as extreme self-solicitude is the enemy of well-being. (John Updike)
John Updike - From the Poetry category:
-on Peter Ackroyd's T. S. Eliot...
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)
John Updike - From the Politics category:
Government is either organized benevolence or organized madness; its peculiar magnitude permits no shading. (John Updike)
John Updike - From the Politics category:
To be President of the United States, sir, is to act as advocate for a blind, venomous, and ungrateful client; still, one must make the best of the case, for the purposes of Providence. (John Updike)
John Updike - From the Possessions category:
Americans have been conditioned to respect newness, whatever it costs them. (John Updike)
John Updike - From the Procrastination category:
-In the Beauty of the Lilies, 1996
Vagueness and procrastination are ever a comfort to the frail in spirit. (John Updike)
John Updike - From the Questions category:
Among the repulsions of atheism for me has been its drastic uninterestingness as an intellectual position. Where was the ingenuity, the ambiguity, the humanity (in the Harvard sense) of saying that the universe just happened to happen and that when we're dead we're dead? (John Updike)
John Updike - From the Religion category:
Religion enables us to ignore nothingness and get on with the jobs of life. (John Updike)
John Updike - From the Religion category:
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. (John Updike)
John Updike - From the Religion category:
The guarantee that our self enjoys an intended relation to the outer world is most, if not all, we ask from religion. God is the self projected onto reality by our natural and necessary optimism. He is the not-me personified. (John Updike)
John Updike - From the Religion category:
-Rabbit, Run
Christianity isn't looking for a rainbow. If it were... we'd pass out opium at services. We're trying to serve God, not be God. (John Updike)
John Updike - From the Revelation category:
An affair wants to spill, to share its glory with the world. No act is so private it does not seek applause. (John Updike)
John Updike - From the Rules category:
Any decent kind of world, you wouldn't need all these rules. (John Updike)
John Updike - From the Seeing category:
It skims in through the eye, and by means of the utterly delicate retina hurls shadows like insect legs inward for translation. Then an immense space opens up in silence and an endlessly fecund sub-universe the writer descends, and asks the reader to descend after him, not merely to gain instructions but also to experience delight, the delight of mind freed from matter and exultant in the strength it has stolen from matter. (John Updike)
John Updike - From the Solitude category:
Writers may be disreputable, incorrigible, early to decay or late to bloom but they dare to go it alone. (John Updike)
John Updike - From the Space category:
The inner spaces that a good story lets us enter are the old apartments of religion. (John Updike)
John Updike - From the Space category:
What art offers is space - a certain breathing room for the spirit. (John Updike)
John Updike - From the Success category:
That a marriage ends is less than ideal; but all things end under heaven, and if temporality is held to be invalidating, then nothing real succeeds. (John Updike)
John Updike - From the Survival category:
We do survive every moment, after all, except the last one. (John Updike)
John Updike - From the Taste category:
I think ''taste'' is a social concept and not an artistic one. 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)
John Updike - From the Teaching category:
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)
John Updike - From the Time category:
-A Month of Sundays, 1975
Suspect each moment, for it is a thief, tiptoeing away with more than it brings. (John Updike)
John Updike - From the Time category:
Time is our element, not a mistaken invader. (John Updike)
John Updike - From the Travel category:
Most of American life consists of driving somewhere and then returning home, wondering why the hell you went. (John Updike)
John Updike - From the Truth category:
Truth should not be forced; it should simply manifest itself, like a woman who has in her privacy reflected and coolly decided to bestow herself upon a certain man. (John Updike)
John Updike - From the Wisdom category:
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, and float upward in our heedlessness, singing Gratia Dei sum quod sum [trans. Thanks be to God that I am what I am]. (John Updike)
John Updike - From the Wisdom category:
You know how it is with fathers, you never escape the idea that maybe after all they're right. (John Updike)
John Updike - From the Words category:
We hope the 'real' person behind the words will be revealed as ignominiously as a shapeless snail without its shapely shell. (John Updike)
John Updike - From the Worth category:
Possession diminishes perception of value, immediately. (John Updike)
John Updike - From the Writing category:
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. (John Updike)
John Updike - From the Writing category:
Writers take words seriously - perhaps 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)
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