Top 488 Quotes & Sayings by John Updike - Page 5

What we need is progress with an escape hatch.

Fraud makes the world go round.

Yes, there is a ton of information on the web, but much of it is egregiously inaccurate, unedited, unattributed and juvenile.

Man makes one journey all his living days, Down through the realms of music and of art; Down through the halls of fame and glorious praise; Down through the tears and triumphs of the heart To some sweet woman waiting some place there. For her he builds his cities and makes war, Seeks gold and glorious wealth to store.

Sun and moon, sun and moon, time goes.

When you look into a mirror it is not yourself you see, but a kind of apish error posed in fearful symmetry kool uoy nehW rorrim a otni ton si ti ?ees uoy flesruoy dnik a tub rorre hsipa fo lufraef ni desop yrtemmys

Most writers begin with accounts of their first home, their family, and the town, often from quite a hostile point of view-love/hate, let's say. In a way, this stepping outside, in an attempt to judge enough to create a duplicate of it, makes you an outsider. . . . I think it's healthy for a writer to feel like an outsider. If you feel like an insider you get committed to a partisan view, you begin to defend interests, so you wind up not really empathizing with all mankind.

Hemingway describes literary New York as a bottle full of tapeworms trying to feed on each other.

How circumstantial reality is! Facts are like individual letters, with their spikes and loops and thorns, that make up words: eventually they hurt our eyes, and we long to take a bath, to rake the lawn, to look at the sea.

New York is of course many cities, and an exile does not return to the one he left.

All men are mortal, and therefore all men are losers; our profoundest loyalty goes out to the failed.

Children are not a zoo of entertainingly exotic creatures, but an array of mirrors in which the human predicament leaps out at us.

Life is a razor, you are always in hot water or a scrape.

People go around mourning the death of God; it's the death of sssin that bothers me. Without ssin, people aren't people any more, they're just ssoul-less sheep.

The great thing about the dead, they make space.

How can you respect the world when you see it's being run by a bunch of kids turned old?

Looking foolish does the spirit good.

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.

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

There was a beauty here bigger than the hurtling beauty of basketball, a beauty refined from country pastures, a game of solitariness, of waiting, waiting for the pitcher to complete his gaze toward first base and throw his lightning, a game whose very taste, of spit and dust and grass and sweat and leather and sun, was America.

I never made a decision in my life that wasn't one hundred per cent selfish.

What you haven't done by thirty you're not likely to do. What you have done you'll do lots more.

In memory's telephoto lens, far objects are magnified.

Fiction is very greedy. It will take all you know and then some. The first novel I tried to write, I was struck by this - the appetite of the blank page for ever more information, ever more data. An empty book is a greedy thing. You are right: You wind up using everything you know, and often more than once.

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...'

I really don't want to encourage young writers. Keep them down and out and silent is my motto.

Life, too much of it, and not enough. The fear that it will end some day, and the fear that tomorrow will be the same as yesterday.

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.

Being on TV is like being alive, only more so.

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.

Critics are like pigs at the pastry cart.

Away, away, from men and towns, To the wild wood and the downs ? To the silent wilderness Where the soul need not repress Its music lest it should not find An echo in another's mind.

We all begin life as parasites within the mother, and writers begin their existence imitatively, within the body of letters.

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

The golf swing is like a suitcase into which we are trying to pack one too many things.

What is the past, after all, but a vast sheet of darkness in which a few moments, pricked apparently at random, shine?

Human was the music, natural was the static.

One does not go to Moscow to get fat.

School is where you go between when your parents can't take you and industry can't take you.

I was made to feel I could do things. If you get this feeling early and can hold it until you're 15, you tend to never lose it.

There is the fear that you somehow neglected to say what was really yours to say.

Wickedness was like food: once you got started it was hard to stop; the gut expanded to take in more and more.

Everybody who tells you how to act has whiskey on their breath.

Many men are more faithful to their golf partners than to their wives and have stuck with them longer.

Prose should have a flow, the forward momentum of a certain energized weight; it should feel like a voice tumbling in your ear.

Is not the decisive difference between comedy and tragedy that tragedy denies us another chance?

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.

An American in London...cannot but be impressed and charmed by the city. The momumentality of Washington, the thriving business of New York, the antique intimacy of Boston, plus a certain spacious and open feeling reminiscent of Denver and San Francisco-all these he finds combined for his pleasure.

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.

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.

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.

It is not difficult to deceive the first time, for the deceived possesses no antibodies; unvaccinated by suspicion, she overlooks lateness, accepts absurd excuses, permits the flimsiest patching to repair great rents in the quotidian.

Of plants tomatoes seemed the most human, eager and fragile and prone to rot.

An old essay by John Updike begins, 'We live in an era of gratuitous inventions and negative improvements.' That language is general and abstract, near the top of the ladder. It provokes our thinking, but what concrete evidence leads Updike to his conclusion ? The answer is in his second sentence : 'Consider the beer can.' To be even more specific, Updike was complaining that the invention of the pop-top ruined the aesthetic experience of drinking beer. 'Pop-top' and 'beer' are at the bottom of the ladder, 'aesthetic experience' at the top.

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

You can never get the smell of smoke out. Like the smell of failure in life.

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.

Try to develop actual work habits, and even though you have a busy life, try to reserve an hour, say - or more - a day to write. Some very good things have been written on an hour a day.

Russia is the only country of the world you can be homesick for while you're still in it.

Let us not mock God with metaphor, Analogy, sidestepping, transcendence; Making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the Faded credulity of earlier ages: Let us walk through the door.