Top 488 Quotes & Sayings by John Updike - Page 3

Thinking it over, I can't locate another artist in the Updike family.

Nature refuses to rest.

My reading as a child was lazy and cowardly, and it is yet. I was afraid of encountering, in a book, something I didn't want to know.

Books externalise our brains and turn our homes into thinking bodies.

There should always be something gratuitous about art, just as there seems to be, according to the new-wave cosmologists, something gratuitous about the universe.

It is not an aesthetic misstep to make the viewer aware of the paint and the painter's hand. Such an empathetic awareness lies at the heart of aesthetic appreciation.

All cartoonists are geniuses, but Arnold Roth is especially so.

My first ambition was to be an animator for Walt Disney. Then I wanted to be a magazine cartoonist.

America is beyond power; it acts as in a dream, as a face of God. Wherever America is, there is freedom, and wherever America is not, madness rules with chains, darkness strangles millions. Beneath her patient bombers, paradise is possible.

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

I love Shillington not as one loves Capri or New York, because they are special, but as one loves one's own body and consciousness, because they are synonymous with being.

Harvard has enough panegyrists without me.

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.

For whatever crispness and animation my writing has I give some credit to the cartoonist manque.

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.

The reader knows the writer better than he knows himself; but the writer's physical presence is light from a star that has moved on.

My transition from wanting to be a cartoonist to wanting to be a writer may have come about through that friendly opposition, that even-handed pairing, of pictures and words.

My attempt has been really to, beyond making a record of contemporary life, which is what you inevitably do, is trying to make beautiful books - books that are in some way beautiful, that are models of how to use the language, models of honest feeling, models of care.

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.

Fiction is burdened for me with a sense of duty.

People are incorrigibly themselves.

The firmest house in my fiction, probably, is the little thick-walled sandstone farmhouse of 'The Centaur' and 'Of the Farm'; I had lived in that house, and can visualize every floorboard and bit of worn molding.

Perhaps I have written fiction because everything unambiguously expressed seems somehow crass to me; and when the subject is myself, I want to jeer and weep.

I don't write about too many male businessmen, and I'm not apt to write about too many female businessmen.

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

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.

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.

A room containing Philip Roth, I have noticed, begins hilariously to whirl and pulse with a mix of rebelliousness and constriction that I take to be Oedipal.

The first author I met socially was Joyce Cary.

My golf is so delicate, so tenuously wired together with silent inward prayers, exhortations and unstable visualizations, that the sheer pressure of an additional pair of eyes crumbles the whole rickety structure into rubble.

Our artistic heroes tend to be those self-exercisers, like Picasso, and Nabokov, and Wallace Stevens, who rather defiantly kept playing past dark.

Belief, like love, must be voluntary.

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.

If the worst comes true, and the paper book joins the papyrus scroll and parchment codex in extinction, we will miss, I predict, a number of things about it.

In becoming an icon, it is useful to die young.

Somehow, it is hard to dislike a man once you have played a round of golf with him.

If my mother hadn't been trying to be a writer, I don't know if I would have thought of it myself.

I feel old only when I look at my hands or at myself in the mirror.

The rich - they just live in another realm, really.

Young or old, a writer sends a book into the world, not himself.

Authors should be honored only for their works.

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.

The study of literature threatens to become a kind of paleontology of failure, and criticism a supercilious psychoanalysis of authors.

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

I would write ads for deodorants or labels for catsup bottles if I had to.

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.

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.

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

It's sort of good to see your vocation as a daily task and have fairly modest expectations for financial or reward in other coin - glory, love, whatever.

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

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

Old age treats freelance writers pretty gently.

As movers and the moved both know, books are heavy freight, the weight of refrigerators and sofas broken up into cardboard boxes. They make us think twice about changing addresses.

Memory has a spottiness, as if the film was sprinkled with developer instead of immersed in it.

For a long time, I was under the impression that 'Terry and the Pirates' was the best comic strip in the United States.

We are drawn to artists who tell us that art is difficult to do and takes a spiritual effort, because we are still puritan enough to respect a strenuous spiritual effort.

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.

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

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.

In a city like New York, you're aware of the rich and poor.