John Updike Quotes - Page 14

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• Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that's the stuff life is made of.
  Suspect each moment, for it is a thief, tiptoeing away with more than it brings.

  John Updike

  Time, Love Life, Thieves

  4 Copy quote

• All love is betrayal, in that it flatters life. The loveless man is best armed.

  John Updike

  Betrayal, Love Is, Men

  John Updike (1968). “COUPLES”

  5 Copy quote

• Why does one never hear of government funding for the preservation and encouragement of comic strips, girlie magazines and TV soap operas? Because these genres still hold the audience they were created to amuse and instruct.

  John Updike

  Encouragement, Government, Opera

  1985 In the New York Review of Books, 18 Jul.

  4 Copy quote

• A writer's self-consciousness, for which he is much scorned, is really a mode of interestedness, that inevitably turns outward.

  John Updike

  Self, Consciousness, Turns

  1989 Self-Consciousness, I.'A Soft Spring Night in Shillington'

  4 Copy quote

• But it is just two lovers, holding hands and in a hurry to reach their car, their locked hands a starfish leaping through the dark.

  John Updike

  Dark, Hands, Two

  John Updike (2010). “Rabbit, Run”, p.35, Random House

  14 Copy quote

• You have a life and there are these volumes on either side that go unvisited; some day soon as the world winds he will lie beneath what he now stands on, dead as those insects whose sound he no longer hears, and the grass will go on growing, wild and blind.

  John Updike

  Lying, Wind, Sides

  John Updike (2010). “Rabbit Is Rich”, p.313, Random House

  5 Copy quote

• Sex ages us. Priests are boyish, spinsters stay black-haired until after fifty. We others, the demon rots us out.

  John Updike

  Sex, Black, Age

  John Updike (1981). “Rabbit is Rich: Rabbit Redux ; Rabbit, Run”

  17 Copy quote

• "Hit it with the back of your left hand" was the first swing thought I ever heard, brusquely bu not unlovingly put to me by the aunt-in-law who had moments before placed a golf club in my virgin grip. I was twenty-five, and had spent my youth in a cloisterd precinct of teh middle class where golf was a rumoured something, like champagne breakfasts and divorce, that the rich did.

  John Updike

  Divorce, Golf, Aunt

  4 Copy quote

• When we try in good faith to believe in materialism, in the exclusive reality of the physical, we are asking our selves to step aside; we are disavowing the very realm where we exist and where all things precious are kept - the realm of emotion and conscience, of memory and intention and sensation.

  John Updike

  Memories, Believe, Reality

  John Updike (2012). “Self-Consciousness: Memoirs”, p.250, Random House

  8 Copy quote

• Don't you see, if when we die there's nothing, all your sun and fields and what not are all, ah, horror? It's just an ocean of horror.

  John Updike

  Ocean, Fields, Sun

  4 Copy quote

• What other sport holds out hope of improvement to a man or a woman over fifty? True, the pros begin to falter at around forty, but it is their putting nerves that go, not their swings. For a duffer like [me], the room for improvement is so vast that three lifetimes could be spent roaming the fiarways carving away at it, convinced that perfection lies just over the next rise. And that hope, perhaps, is the kindest bliss of all that golf bestows upon its devotees.

  John Updike

  Sports, Lying, Golf

  6 Copy quote

• From the standpoint of a Middle Eastern citizen, Americans look like a bully forcing our way of life on the Islamic way of life. The notion of purity is very important in Islam, and a lot of the negative warlike actions taken against us have to do with our physical presence in the Middle East. Osama bin Laden was trying to get the American, or protesting the American military presence in Saudi Arabia. It's not surprising that our strong presence in Iraq has produced a wave of resistance anger, extreme anger in some cases, and a permissive atmosphere that allows these people to go undetected.

  John Updike

  Strong, Military, Taken

  Source: www.today.com

  5 Copy quote

• Musicians are very mysterious and wonderful people to me; I don't know how they do it.

  John Updike

  People, Musician, Mysterious

  Source: www.neh.gov

  5 Copy quote

• My mother didn't raise me to be a critic, but I seem to have become one anyway.

  John Updike

  Mother, Critics, Raises

  Source: www.neh.gov

  5 Copy quote

• Seemed to me important in writing about people to be able to describe the sexual transactions between them. It's - for many people it's the height of, what they see, of ecstasy and poetry is in their sexual encounters. And furthermore, personality - human personality does not end in the bedroom, but persists.

  John Updike

  Writing, People, Personality

  "Remembering John Updike, Literary Legend". www.npr.org. January 28, 2009.

  5 Copy quote

• What seems to sell books is good word-of-mouth, not promotion tours. I'm too old to believe that media promotion of a book really matters. What matters is how it will look 100 years from now, not how many copies are sold.

  John Updike

  Believe, Book, What Matters

  5 Copy quote

• So, you know, I think any life has in it enough material, enough points of departure, to fuel a writer's career and that we shouldn't worry about what we're not but to try to focus on what we are and what we do know.

  John Updike

  Thinking, Careers, Worry

  John Updike, James Plath (1994). “Conversations with John Updike”, p.212, Univ. Press of Mississippi

  5 Copy quote

• I think it's the sentence-to-sentence pleasures, the little surprises of a surprising style of an acute style, and also the way things happen one after the other, that makes a book interesting to read page to page

  John Updike

  Book, Thinking, Interesting

  John Updike, James Plath (1994). “Conversations with John Updike”, p.210, Univ. Press of Mississippi

  5 Copy quote

• I did feel as though a number of critics had appointed themselves, when they sat down with a new book of mine, to rectify what they felt to be was my inflated reputation and so that the book in hand was not really given a chance but made a kind of weapon in the general attempt to bring me down to size.

  John Updike

  Book, Hands, Numbers

  John Updike, James Plath (1994). “Conversations with John Updike”, Univ Pr of Mississippi

  6 Copy quote

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