QUOTES by John Updike
Find most favourite and famour Authors from A.A Milne to Zoe Kravitz.
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.
Quote by -John Updike
The essential self is innocent, and when it tastes its own innocence knows that it lives for ever.
Quote by -John Updike
Writers may be disreputable, incorrigible, early to decay or late to bloom but they dare to go it alone.
Quote by -John Updike
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.
Quote by -John Updike
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.
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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.
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My last vivid boyhood fright from books came when I was 15; I was visiting my uncle and aunt in Greenwich, and, emboldened by my success with 'The Waste Land,' I opened their copy of 'Ulysses.' The whiff of death off those remorseless, closely written pages overpowered me. So: back to soluble mysteries, and jokes that were not cosmic.
Quote by -John Updike
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.
Quote by -John Updike
When I was born, my parents and my mother's parents planted a dogwood tree in the side yard of the large white house in which we lived throughout my boyhood. This tree I learned quite early, was exactly my age - was, in a sense, me.
Quote by -John Updike
To be President of the United States, sir, is to act as advocate for a blind, venomous, and ungrateful client.
Quote by -John Updike
I was an only child. I needed an alternative to family life - to real life, you could almost say - and cartoons, pictures in a book, the animated movies, seemed to provide it.
Quote by -John Updike
Most of American life consists of driving somewhere and then returning home, wondering why the hell you went.
Quote by -John Updike
We're past the age of heroes and hero kings... Most of our lives are basically mundane and dull, and it's up to the writer to find ways to make them interesting.
Quote by -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.
Quote by -John Updike
The dwelling places of Europe have an air of inheritance, or cumulative possession - a hive occupied by generations of bees.
Quote by -John Updike
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.
Quote by -John Updike
Mars has long exerted a pull on the human imagination. The erratically moving red star in the sky was seen as sinister or violent by the ancients: The Greeks identified it with Ares, the god of war; the Babylonians named it after Nergal, god of the underworld. To the ancient Chinese, it was Ying-huo, the fire planet.
Quote by -John Updike
Golf's ultimate moral instruction directs us to find within ourselves a pivotal center of enjoyment: relax into a rhythm that fits the hills and swales, and play the shot at hand - not the last one, or the next one, but the one at your feet, in the poison ivy, where you put it.
Quote by -John Updike
The cinema has done more for my spiritual life than the church. My ideas of fame, success and beauty all originate from the big screen. Whereas Christian religion is retreating everywhere and losing more and more influence; film has filled the vacuum and supports us with myths and action-controlling images.
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Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right or better.
Quote by -John Updike
Every marriage tends to consist of an aristocrat and a peasant. Of a teacher and a learner.
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A healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people's patience.
Quote by -John Updike
Professionalism in art has this difficulty: To be professional is to be dependable, to be dependable is to be predictable, and predictability is esthetically boring - an anti-virtue in a field where we hope to be astonished and startled and at some deep level refreshed.
Quote by -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.
Quote by -John Updike
Dreams come true; without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them.
Quote by -John Updike