John Updike Quotes - Page 9

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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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• One of the cool, chaste countries - Canada or Sweden.

  John Updike

  Country, Sweden, Canada

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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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• 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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• Art imitates Nature in this; not to dare is to dwindle.

  John Updike

  Art, Nature, Artist

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• Life is like an overlong drama through which we sit being nagged by the vague memories of having read the reviews.

  John Updike

  Life, Memories, Drama

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• But for a few phrases from his letters and an odd line or two of his verse, the poet walks gagged through his own biography.

  John Updike

  Two, Biographies, Phrases

  John Updike (2012). “Odd Jobs: Essays and Criticism”, p.838, Random House

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• Baseball is meant to be fun, and not all the solemn money-men in fur-collared greatcoats, not all the scruffy media cameramen and sour-faced reporters that crowd around the dugouts can quite smother the exhilarating spaciousness and grace of this impudently relaxed sport, a game of innumerable potential redemptions and curious disappointments.

  John Updike

  Sports, Baseball, Fun

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• The educational aspect of art shows has become overbearing: some of exhibits can leave you bleary from trying to read the walls. Presumably a piece of art is timeless and it can say something to us. You are taking away the right of art to talk for itself.

  John Updike

  Art, Wall, Educational

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• I'm not against TV; I don't go on the morning talk shows because I'm not invited. If I was, I might go.

  John Updike

  Morning, Goes On, Might

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• I write about, more or less, everything I can think of, that is I stretch my imagination as far as it'll go. I am kind of stuck in the middle as far as my life goes, and hence my imagination tends to zero in on things which are indeed in the middle. That is, I don't write about the very rich, who I scarcely know, or the very poor who I don't know very well either.

  John Updike

  Zero, Writing, Thinking

  "Remembering John Updike, Literary Legend". "Fresh Air" with Terry Gross, www.npr.org. March 17, 1988.

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• The illusion is an agreement between the reader and writer that this [story] will be like life. The emotional temperature drops when you have footnotes.

  John Updike

  Emotional, Agreement, Stories

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• I think people do look to writers to tell the truth in a way that nobody else quite will, not politicians or ministers or sociologists. A writer's job, is to, by way of fiction, somehow describe the way we live. And to me, this seems an important task, very worth doing, and I think also, to the reading public, it seems, even though they might not articulate it, it seems to them something worth doing also.

  John Updike

  Jobs, Reading, Thinking

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• In general, the churches, visited by me often on weekdays... bore for me the same relation to God that billboards did to Coca-Cola; they promoted thirst without quenching it.

  John Updike

  Religion, Church, Weekdays

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• In all the green world nothing feels as good as a woman's good nature.

  John Updike

  Green World, Good Nature, Feels

  John Updike (2010). “Rabbit, Run”, p.98, Random House

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• The muttered hint, "Remember, you have a stroke here," freezes my joints like a blast from Siberia.

  John Updike

  Golf, Remember You, Remembers You

  John Updike (2011). “Golf Dreams: Writings on Golf”, p.33, Random House

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• There is always a chance of failure, of producing something totally unnecessary. But I guess that chance of failure is what makes tightrope walking, race-car driving.

  John Updike

  Race, Car, Chance

  Source: www.neh.gov

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• I'm somewhat shy about the brutal facts of being a carnivore. I don't like meat to look like animals. I prefer it in the form of sausages, hamburger and meat loaf, far removed from the living thing.

  John Updike

  Animal, Meat, Shy

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• We are each of us like our little blue planet, hung in black space, upheld by nothing but our mutual reassurances, our loving lies.

  John Updike

  Lying, Space, Blue

  John Updike (2006). “Rabbit at Rest”, p.280, Penguin UK

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• If men do not keep on speaking terms with children, they cease to be men, and become merely machines for eating and for earning money.

  John Updike

  Children, Men, Ice Cream

  John Updike (2012). “Assorted Prose”, p.244, Random House

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• There was clearly great charm and worth in a sport so quaintly perverse in its basic instructions. Hit down to make the ball rise. Swing easy to make it go far. Finish high to make it go straight.

  John Updike

  Sports, Golf, Swings

  John Updike (2011). “Golf Dreams: Writings on Golf”, p.24, Random House

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• To be human is to be in the tense condition of a death-foreseeing, consciously libidinous animal. No other earthly creature suffers such a capacity for thought, such a complexity of envisioned but frustrated possibilities, such a troubling ability to question the tribal and biological imperatives.

  John Updike

  Animal, Frustrated, Suffering

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• Dream golf is simply golf played on another course. We chip from glass tables onto moving stairways; we swing in a straightjacket, through masses of cobweb, and awaken not with any sense of unjust hazard but only with a regret that the round can never be completed, and that one of our phantasmal companions has kept the scorecard.

  John Updike

  Dream, Regret, Moving

  John Updike (2012). “Golf Dreams”, p.22, Penguin UK

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• What you lose as you age is witnesses, the ones that watched from early on and cared, like your own little grandstand.

  John Updike

  Age, Littles, Like You

  John Updike (2010). “Rabbit Is Rich”, p.524, Random House

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