A&p Updike Quotes: top 100 famous quotes about A&p Updike

A&p Updike Quotes & Sayings

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A Christian novelist tries to describe the world as it is. — John Updike

I still want to give my public, such as it is, a book a year. — John Updike

Fiction is burdened for me with a sense of duty. — John Updike

It's a man's world, they say; but in its daily textures it is a world created by and for women. — John Updike

A number of American colleges are willing to pay a tempting amount to pinch and poke an author for a day or two. — John Updike

When you sit at your desk, if you're lucky, there's a moment when you feel empowered to be someone or something else, to leap into another skin. — John Updike

An earth hard as iron lay locked beneath a sky whose mottled clouds spit snow like ashes sucked up a chimney and then dispersed with the smoke. — John Updike

John Updike's first published book was a collection of poems. — Jonathan Galassi

Children are not a zoo of entertainingly exotic creatures, but an array of mirrors in which the human predicament leaps out at us. — John Updike

Life is a video game. No matter how good you get, you are always zapped in the end. — John Updike

Families, doing everything for each other out of imagined obligation and always getting in each other's way, what a tangle. — John Updike

Hemingway describes literary New York as a bottle full of tapeworms trying to feed on each other. — John Updike

My actinic keratosis is a result of the triumphalism of the beach. The sun exacerbates it. — John Updike

It's so hard to make a good tee shot after a birdie. — John Updike

Somehow Rabbit can't tear his attention from where the ball should have gone, the little ideal napkin of clipped green pinked with a pretty flag. — John Updike

If my mother hadn't been trying to be a writer, I don't know if I would have thought of it myself. — John Updike

I don't recall inclement weather on a fair day. — John Updike

Inspiration arrives as a packet of material to be delivered. — John Updike

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

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

I'm a dull person. — John Updike

Reagan has turned America into a tax haven. — John Updike

It is not enough for a story to flow. It has to kind of trickle and glint as it crosses over the stones of the bare facts. — John Updike

Somehow, it is hard to dislike a man once you have played a round of golf with him. — John Updike

Geography! That's something they teach in the third grade! I never heard of a grownup studying geography. — John Updike

When a solipsist dies ... everything goes with him. — David Foster Wallace

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

A person believes various things at various times, even on the same day. — John Updike

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

We take our bearings, daily, from others. To be sane is, to a great extent, to be sociable. — John Updike

A cynic is a kind of romantic who has aged. — John Updike

In a country this large and a language even larger ... there ought to be a living for somebody who cares and wants to entertain and instruct a reader. — John Updike

In a way, gluttony is an athletic feat, a stretching exercise. — John Updike

What is this? He has a sensation of touching glass. He doesn't know if they are talking about nothing or making code for the deepest meanings. — John Updike

(on Updike) Has the son of a bitch ever had one unpublished thought? — David Foster Wallace

The study of literature threatens to become a kind of paleontology of failure, and criticism a supercilious psychoanalysis of authors. — John Updike

You do things and do things and nobody really has a clue. — John Updike

Until the 20th century it was generally assumed that a writer had said what he had to say in his works. — John Updike

All those little congruences and arabesques you prepared with such delicate anticipatory pleasure are gobbled up as if by pigs at a pastry cart. — John Updike

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

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

A house, having been willfully purchased and furnished, tells us more than a body, and its description is a foremost resource of the art of fiction. — John Updike

He had mistaken the two of them for one and entrusted to her this ghost of his alone. A mistake married people make. — John Updike

The reader knows the writer better than he knows himself; but the writer's physical presence is light from a star that has moved on. — John Updike

I secretly understood: the primitive appeal of the hearth. Television is - its irresistible charm - a fire. — John Updike

Baseball skills schizophrenically encompass a pitcher's, a batter's and a fielder's. — John Updike

Yes, there is a ton of information on the Web, but much of it is egregiously inaccurate, unedited, unattributed and juvenile. — John Updike

I find in my own writing that only fiction - and rarely, a poem - fully tests me to the kind of limits of what I know and what I feel. — John Updike

Updike worked this way, and I just kinda borrowed it from him. So the memoir will be relief from novel writing for a moment. — Rick Moody

Memory has a spottiness, as if the film was sprinkled with developer instead of immersed in it. — John Updike

To guarantee the individual maximum freedom within a social frame of minimal laws ensures - if not happiness - its hopeful pursuit. — John Updike

I don't know; I think I'd be gloomy without some faith that there is a purpose and there is a kind of witness to my life. — John Updike

I suppose sequels are inevitable for a writer of a certain age. — John Updike

New York is a city with virtually no habitable public space - only private spaces expensively maintained within the general disaster. — John Updike

Time is our element, not a mistaken invader. — John Updike

If she'd been born at the right time they would have burned her over in Salem. — John Updike

A photograph offers us a glimpse into the abyss of time. — John Updike

But the nightmares were accurate enough: we are like a swarm of mosquitoes, crazy with thirst and doomed to be swatted. — John Updike

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

Life is a nacho. It can be yummy-crunchy or squishy-yucky. It just depends on how long it takes for you to start eating it. — John Updike

In a city like New York, you're aware of the rich and poor. — John Updike

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

What is the past, after all, but a vast sheet of darkness in which a few moments, pricked apparently at random, shine? — John Updike

I see no intrinsic reason why a doubly talented artist might not arise and create a comic-strip novel masterpiece. — John Updike

Being able to write becomes a kind of shield, a way of hiding, a way of too instantly transforming pain into honey. — John Updike

Vagueness and procrastination are ever a comfort to the frail in spirit. — John Updike

Suspect each moment, for it is a thief, tiptoeing away with more than it brings. — John Updike

A seventeenth-century house tends to be short on frills like hallways and closets; you must improvise. — John Updike

Being a great writer is not the same as writing great. — John Updike

Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face. — John Updike

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

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

Oh,' she says, 'the Vat prints nothing but rapes. You know what a rape usually is? It's a woman who changed her mind afterward. — John Updike

My life is, in a sense, trash. My life is only that of which the residue is my writing. — John Updike

His insides are beginning to feel sickly. The pain of the world is a crater all these syrups and pills a thousandfold would fail to fill. — John Updike

Prose should have a flow, the forward momentum of a certain energized weight; it should feel like a voice tumbling in your ear. — John Updike

I've always tried to write about America. It's very worth a writer's effort. — John Updike

The measure of artistic merit is the length to which a writer is willing to go in following his own compulsions. — John Updike

We must have sinned greatly, at some juncture long buried in our protozoic past, to deserve such a universe — John Updike

A lot of the Koran does not speak very eloquently to a Westerner. Much of it is either legalistic or opaquely poetic. — John Updike

Faith is not so much a binary pole as a quantum state, which tends to indeterminacy when closely examined. — John Updike

Christianity isn't looking for a rainbow. If it were ... we'd pass out opium at services. We're trying to serve God, not be God. — John Updike

The inner spaces that a good story lets us enter are the old apartments of religion. — John Updike

Does fiction, artistic writing, have much of a future? I must say it's on the way out. — John Updike

Writing and rewriting are a constant search for what it is one is saying. — John Updike

Life is a roller coaster, you have your ups and downs unless you fall off. — John Updike

A yawning repetitiveness as of a man who knows few words but will not stop talking. — John Updike

My first ambition was to be an animator for Walt Disney. Then I wanted to be a magazine cartoonist. — John Updike

Life is a razor, you are always in hot water or a scrape. — John Updike

By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved. — John Updike

Actuality is a running impoverishment of possibility. — John Updike

To be President of the United States, sir, is to act as advocate for a blind, venomous, and ungrateful client. — John Updike

The day is declining through the white afternoon to the long blue spring evening. He drives past a corner where someone is practicing on a trumpet — John Updike

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

Intent on prayer, she has a dumb girl's sweet piercing way of putting her whole body into one thing at a time. — John Updike

Money is like water in a leaky bucket: no sooner there, it begins to drip. — John Updike

How can you respect the world when you see it's being run by a bunch of kids turned old? — John Updike

Death is easily fooled. If the churches don't work, a filter will do. — John Updike

There is no doubt that I have lots of words inside me; but at moments, like rush-hour traffic at the mouth of a tunnel, they jam. — John Updike

I was trying to support a family with writing. I didn't have a private income. I had no other profession. — John Updike