A Quote by David Shields

I disagree with everything John Updike has ever said. — © David Shields
I disagree with everything John Updike has ever said.
I kissed John Updike as he presented me with an award. It wasn't the best kiss as far as kisses go, but I hold the fact that I kissed John Updike, that he kissed me, very close to my heart.
I don't disagree with anything I've ever said. Why in God's name would I disagree with something I've said?
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.
Sad to think that we won't have any new stories from John Updike, one of the last century's masters. But so many here in the two volumes of his collected stories, 186 by my count, stories to read, reread, savor over the course of a cold season. Updike's genius in the short form spills out of these many, many pages.
I like Philip Roth, John Updike, and Richard Yates.
John Updike's first published book was a collection of poems.
John [Travolta] and I have remained very close friends ever since we did Grease. When I was told that "You're the One That I Want" was named the #1 duet in history and, during a text chat with John letting him know he said "we should record a Christmas song." Of course I said yes.
I think that it's a mistake to assume that because you're taking a position from somebody else who you might disagree with - or you know you disagree with on some things - to assume that you disagree with on everything and to not look at each policy on its own merits.
John Updike is always fun. And one of my former students, Tom Pynchon. And Harold Bloom, another former student.
Everything that happens with me gets made out to be a fiasco, but I have every right to do everything I've ever done. I stand by everything I've ever said, apologies included.
I read Lorrie Moore and Marilynne Robinson and Jhumpa Lahiri and Richard Ford, John Updike, Anton Chekhov, Vladimir Nabokov - all of whom I really fell in love with.
I could never write about the sort of people John Cheever or John Updike or even Margaret Atwood write about. I don't mean I couldn't write as well as they do, which of course I couldn't; they're great writers, and I'm no writer at all. But I couldn't even write badly about normal, neurotic people. I don't know that world from the inside. That's just not my orientation.
A John Updike is a once-in-a-generation phenomenon, if that generation is lucky: so comfortable in so many genres, the same lively, generous intelligence suffusing all he did.
It wasn't until I started to read short stories - by people like Alice Munro, Mavis Gallant, John Updike... Eudora Welty - that I became excited about the possibilities of writing.
It was so interesting, when [John Coltrane] created A Love Supreme. He had meditated that week. I almost didn't see him downstairs. And it was so quiet! There was no sound, no practice! He was up there meditating, and when he came down he said, "I have a whole new music!" He said, "There is a new recording that I will do, I have it all, everything." And it was so beautiful! He was like Moses coming down from the mountain. And when he recorded it, he knew everything, everything. He said this was the first time that he had all the music in his head at once to record.
I got the pilot for 'Scrubs' sent to me, and in the margin for Dr. Cox, it said 'a John McGinley type.' So when I went in to audition, I said to Billy Lawrence, who's a dear friend of mine, I said, 'Well, I'm John McGinley.'
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