John Updike Quotes - Page 8

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

  John Updike

  Television, Alive, Tvs

  John Updike (2012). “Odd Jobs: Essays and Criticism”, p.37, Random House

  4 Copy quote

• Critics are like pigs at the pastry cart.

  John Updike

  Past, Pigs, Critics

  14 Copy quote

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

  John Updike

  Whiskey, Breaths

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

  John Updike

  Food, Tomatoes, Plant

  John Updike (2012). “The Witches of Eastwick: A Novel”, p.7, Random House

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• Women, fire in their crotch, won't burn out, begin by fighting off pricks, end by going wild hunting for one that still works.

  John Updike

  Fighting, Hunting, Fire

  John Updike (2003). “Rabbit, run ; Rabbit redux”

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• Hoping to fashion a mirror, the lover doth polish the face of his beloved until he produces a skull.

  John Updike

  Love, Fashion, Mirrors

  John Updike (2012). “Collected Poems, 1953-1993”, p.85, Knopf

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• Life, just as we first thought, is playing grownup.

  John Updike

  Life, Firsts, Grownups

  John Updike (2010). “Rabbit Is Rich”, p.281, Random House

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• You imagine a reader and try to keep the reader interested. That's storytelling. You also hope to reward the reader with a sense of a completed design, that somebody is in charge, and that while life is pointless, the book isn't pointless. The author knows where he is going. That's form.

  John Updike

  Book, Design, Trying

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• The United States, democratic and various though it is, is not an easy country for a fiction-writer to enter: the slot between the fantastic and the drab seems too narrow.

  John Updike

  Country, Fiction, United States

  1995 Rabbit Angstrom: The Four Novels, introduction.

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• Within your own generation-the same songs, the same wars, the same attitudes toward those wars, the same rules and radio shows in the air-you can gauge the possibilities and impossibilities. With a person of another generation, you are treading water, playing with fire.

  John Updike

  Song, Attitude, War

  John Updike (2010). “Rabbit at Rest”, p.462, Random House

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• Professionalism in art has this difficulty: To be professional is to be dependable, to be dependable is to be predictable, and predictability is esthetically boring - an anti-virtue in a field where we hope to be astonished and startled and at some deep level refreshed.

  John Updike

  Art, Levels, Fields

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

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• Our tears fatten upon our memories of joy.

  John Updike

  Memories, Joy, Tears

  John Updike (2011). “Higher Gossip: Essays and Criticism”, p.68, Random House

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• Atrocity is truly emperor; All things that thrive are slaves of cruel Creation.

  John Updike

  Atrocities, Slave, Creation

  John Updike (2012). “Collected Poems, 1953-1993”, p.476, Knopf

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• President George] Bush talked to us like we were a bunch of morons and we ate it up. Can you imagine, the Pledge of Allegiance, read my lips-can you imagine such crap in this day and age?

  John Updike

  Age, President, Lips

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• Love makes the air light.

  John Updike

  Light, Air

  John Updike (2010). “Rabbit, Run”, p.2, Random House

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• Why does life feel, to us as we experience it, so desperately urgent and so utterly pointless at the same time?

  John Updike

  Doe, Feels, Urgent

  John Updike (2012). “Roger's Version: A Novel”, p.83, Random House

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• I still believe in the American Dream. I see it in terms of freedom, and a government that trusts its people to exercise freedom, that this is not a government that allows you to give, that allows you to explore, and doesn't dampen your own creativity - in the broadest sense - with a lot of dictums or dogmas or restraints. So, insofar as we can remain a free country that allows for the interplay of personal energies. I think this is still a country that is not only working towards a dream, but actually is the dream in action.

  John Updike

  Country, Dream, Believe

  Source: www.achievement.org

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• Basically it's true that my own life has been my chief window for life in America, beginning with my childhood and the conflicts, the struggles, the strains that I felt in my own family.

  John Updike

  Struggle, America, Childhood

  "Two Pulitzer Prizes for Fiction". American Academy of Achievement Interview, www.achievement.org. June 12, 2004.

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• The Florida sun seems not much a single thing overhead but a set of klieg lights that pursue you everywhere with an even white illumination.

  John Updike

  Florida, Light, Illumination

  John Updike (2010). “Rabbit at Rest”, p.75, Random House

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• I can't bear to finish things, beyond a certain point they get heavy. There's something so dead about a finished painting.

  John Updike

  Finishing, Bears, Painting

  John Updike (2006). “The Coup”, p.249, Penguin UK

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• Being a famous writer is a little like being a tall dwarf. You're on the edge of normality.

  John Updike

  Dwarves, Littles, Fame

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• History. The more of it you have the more you have to live it. After a little while there gets to be too much of it to memorize and maybe that's when empires start to decline.

  John Updike

  Empires, Too Much, Littles

  John Updike (2010). “Rabbit Is Rich”, p.260, Random House

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• Hope bases vast premises on foolish accidents, and reads a word where in fact only a scribble exists.

  John Updike

  Facts, Foolish, Scribbles

  "The Early Stories: 1953-1975".

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• Without rain, there would be no life.

  John Updike

  Rain, Would Be

  John Updike (2012). “Self-Consciousness: Memoirs”, p.41, Random House

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• Americans have been conditioned to respect newness, whatever it costs them.

  John Updike

  Respect, Cost, Literature

  1975 A Month of Sundays, ch.18.

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