QUOTES by John Updike
Find most favourite and famour Authors from A.A Milne to Zoe Kravitz.
New York, like the Soviet Union, has this universal usefulness: It makes you glad you live elsewhere.
Quote by -John Updike
My interest generally is the hidden Americans; the ones who live far away from the headlines.
Quote by -John Updike
New York is a city with virtually no habitable public space - only private spaces expensively maintained within the general disaster.
Quote by -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.
Quote by -John Updike
For a long time, I was under the impression that 'Terry and the Pirates' was the best comic strip in the United States.
Quote by -John Updike
I find in my own writing that only fiction - and rarely, a poem - fully tests me to the kind of limits of what I know and what I feel.
Quote by -John Updike
John Barth, I think, was really a writer of my own age and somewhat of my own temperament, although his books are very different from mine, and he has been a spokesman for the very ambitious, long, rather academic novel. But I don't think that what he is saying, so far as I understand it, is so very different from what I'm saying.
Quote by -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.
Quote by -John Updike
Imagine writing a poem with a sweating, worried-looking boy handing you a different pencil at the end of every word. My golf, you may say, is no poem; nevertheless, I keep wanting it to be one.
Quote by -John Updike
Smaller than a breadbox, bigger than a TV remote, the average book fits into the human hand with a seductive nestling, a kiss of texture, whether of cover cloth, glazed jacket, or flexible paperback.
Quote by -John Updike
Government is either organized benevolence or organized madness; its peculiar magnitude permits no shading.
Quote by -John Updike
In fiction, imaginary people become realer to us than any named celebrity glimpsed in a series of rumored events, whose causes and subtler ramifications must remain in the dark. An invented figure like Anna Karenina or Emma Bovary emerges fully into the light of understanding, which brings with it identification, sympathy and pity.
Quote by -John Updike
A number of American colleges are willing to pay a tempting amount to pinch and poke an author for a day or two.
Quote by -John Updike
What interests me is why men think of women as witches. It's because they're so fascinating and exasperating, so other.
Quote by -John Updike
Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.
Quote by -John Updike
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.
Quote by -John Updike
I don't know; I think I'd be gloomy without some faith that there is a purpose and there is a kind of witness to my life.
Quote by -John Updike
From infancy on, we are all spies; the shame is not this but that the secrets to be discovered are so paltry and few.
Quote by -John Updike
I see no intrinsic reason why a doubly talented artist might not arise and create a comic-strip novel masterpiece.
Quote by -John Updike
The writers we tend to universally admire, like Beckett, or Kafka, or TS Eliot, are not very prolific.
Quote by -John Updike
In tennis, there is the forehand, the backhand, the overhead smash and the drop volley, all with a different grip.
Quote by -John Updike
An aging writer has the not insignificant satisfaction of a shelf of books behind him that, as they wait for their ideal readers to discover them, will outlast him for a while.
Quote by -John Updike
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.
Quote by -John Updike
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.
Quote by -John Updike
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.
Quote by -John Updike
An affair wants to spill, to share its glory with the world. No act is so private it does not seek applause.
Quote by -John Updike
My first ambition was to be an animator for Walt Disney. Then I wanted to be a magazine cartoonist.
Quote by -John Updike
Sometimes it seems the whole purpose of pets is to bring death into the house.
Quote by -John Updike
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.
Quote by -John Updike
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.
Quote by -John Updike
We take our bearings, daily, from others. To be sane is, to a great extent, to be sociable.
Quote by -John Updike
Bookstores are lonely forts, spilling light onto the sidewalk. They civilize their neighborhoods.
Quote by -John Updike
American art in general... takes to surreal exaggerations and metaphors; but its Puritan work ethic has little use for the playful self-indulgence behind Parisian Surrealism.
Quote by -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.
Quote by -John Updike
To be a human being is to be in a state of tension between your appetites and your dreams, and the social realities around you and your obligations to your fellow man.
Quote by -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.
Quote by -John Updike
The inner spaces that a good story lets us enter are the old apartments of religion.
Quote by -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.
Quote by -John Updike
By the mid-17th century, telescopes had improved enough to make visible the seasonally growing and shrinking polar ice caps on Mars, and features such as Syrtis Major, a dark patch thought to be a shallow sea.
Quote by -John Updike
The first breath of adultery is the freest; after it, constraints aping marriage develop.
Quote by -John Updike