John Updike Quotes - Page 12

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• Narrative and metaphysics alike become flimsy and frivolous if they venture too far from the home base of all humanism - the single, simple human life that we all more or less lead, with its crude elementals of nurture and appetite, love and competition, the sunshine of well-being and the inevitable night of death. We each live this tale. Fiction has no reason to be embarrassed about telling the same story again and again, since we all, with infinite variations, experience the same story.

  John Updike

  Home, Sunshine, Simple

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• There's a crystallization that goes on in a poem which the young man can bring off, but which the middle-aged man can't.

  John Updike

  Men, Goes On, Middle

  1986 In the New York Times, 24 Mar.

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• The fact that we still live well cannot ease the feeling that we no longer live nobly.

  John Updike

  Feelings, Ease, Facts

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• A photograph presents itself not only as a visual representation, but as evidence, more convincing than a painting because of the unimpeachable mechanical means whereby it was made. We do not trust the artist's flattering hand; but we do trust film, and shadows, and light.

  John Updike

  Mean, Artist, Light

  John Updike (2009). “More Matter: Essays and Criticism”, p.667, Random House

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• Men emerge pale from the little printing plant at four sharp, ghosts for an instant, blinking, until the outdoor light overcomes the look of constant indoor light clinging to them.

  John Updike

  Men, Light, Overcoming

  John Updike (1990). “Rabbit Angstrom: a tetralogy”, Everyman's Library

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• 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.

  John Updike

  Sex, Glowing, Males

  "The Female Body". Michigan Quarterly Review, 1990.

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• I would rather be seated between any two women than any two men at a dinner party.

  John Updike

  Party, Men, Two

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• There is no pleasing New Englanders, my dear, their soil is all rocks and their hearts are bloodless absolutes.

  John Updike

  Heart, Rocks, Literature

  "Buchanan Dying: A Play (Act II)". Book by John Updike, 1974.

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• Not judginess, but openness and curiosity are our proper business. I'm still trying to educate myself. I don't think you need to keep rehearsing your instincts. Far better to seek out models of what you can't do.

  John Updike

  Thinking, Curiosity, Trying

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• 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.

  John Updike

  Morning, Character, Fog

  John Updike (2012). “Collected Poems, 1953-1993”, p.186, Knopf

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• I have never believed that one should wait until one is inspired because I think the pleasures of not writing are so great that if you ever start indulging them you will never write again.

  John Updike

  Writing, Thinking, Waiting

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• I'm always looking for insights into the real Doris Day because I'm stuck with this infatuation and need to explain it to myself.

  John Updike

  Real, Needs, Infatuation

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• I moved to New England partly because it has a real literary past. The ghosts of Hawthorne and Melville still sit on those green hills. The worship of Mammon is also somewhat lessened there by the spirit of irony. I don't get hay fever in New England either.

  John Updike

  Real, Past, Hay Fever

  London Observer, March 25, 1979.

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• Among the repulsions of atheism for me has been its drastic uninterestingness as an intellectual position.

  John Updike

  Atheist, Intellectual, Atheism

  John Updike (2012). “Self-Consciousness: Memoirs”, p.138, Random House

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• When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas.

  John Updike

  Easter, New York, Writing

  John Updike (2013). “Picked-Up Pieces: Essays”, p.472, Random House

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• Museums and bookstores should feel, I think, like vacant lots - places where the demands on us are our own demands, where the spirit can find exercise in unsupervised play.

  John Updike

  Exercise, Thinking, Museums

  "A Few Words In Defense Of The Amateur Reader" by John Updike, www.nytimes.com. February 19, 1984.

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• 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.

  John Updike

  Art, Self, Work Ethic

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• Accent the ugly until it becomes gorgeous.

  John Updike

  Ugly, Gorgeous, Accents

  John Updike (2010). “Rabbit Redux”, p.118, Random House

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• Students present themselves...like a succession of CDs whose shimmering surface gives no clue to their contents without the equipment to play them.

  John Updike

  Cds, Play, Giving

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• Photography is the first art wherein the tool does most of the work.

  John Updike

  Photography, Art, Doe

  John Updike (2009). “More Matter: Essays and Criticism”, p.669, Random House

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• But it seems to me that once you begin a gesture it's fatal not to go through with it.

  John Updike

  Gestures, Seems

  john updike (1962). “pigeon feathers”

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• From infancy on, we are all spies; the shame is not this but that the secrets to be discovered are so paltry and few.

  John Updike

  Infancy Is, Secret, Spy

  "Bech: A Book". Book by John Updike, 1965.

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• What more fiendish proof of cosmic irresponsibility than a Nature which, having invented sex as a way to mix genes, then permits to arise, amid all its perfumed and hypnotic inducements to mate, a tireless tribe of spirochetes and viruses that torture and kill us for following orders?

  John Updike

  Sex, Health, Order

  John Updike (2012). “Self-Consciousness: Memoirs”, p.230, Random House

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• The yearning for an afterlife is the opposite of selfish: it is love and praise for the world that we are privileged, in this complex interval of light, to witness and experience.

  John Updike

  Selfish, Light, Opposites

  John Updike (2012). “Self-Consciousness: Memoirs”, p.214, Random House

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• 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.

  John Updike

  Marriage, Real, Heaven

  John Updike (2011). “Higher Gossip: Essays and Criticism”, p.467, Random House

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