John Updike Quotes
Collection of top 100 famous quotes about John Updike
John Updike Quotes & Sayings
Happy to read and share the best inspirational John Updike quotes, sayings and quotations on Wise Famous Quotes.
Writing makes you more human.
— 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
John Updike's first published book was a collection of poems.
— Jonathan Galassi
I think you remember certain phrases from bad reviews. You don't remember all the bad reviews.
— John Updike
Affairs, ... , like everything else, ask too much.
— John Updike
Suddenly summoned to witness something great and horrendous, we keep fighting not to reduce it to our own smallness.
— John Updike
Hemingway describes literary New York as a bottle full of tapeworms trying to feed on each other.
— John Updike
Of nothing but me I sing, lacking another song.
— 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
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
Geography! That's something they teach in the third grade! I never heard of a grownup studying geography.
— John Updike
First snow: it came this year late in November.
— John Updike
In no other sport must the spectator move.
— John Updike
Do what the heart commands. The heart is our only guide.
— 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
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
The writers we tend to universally admire, like Beckett, or Kafka, or TS Eliot, are not very prolific.
— John Updike
I see no intrinsic reason why a doubly talented artist might not arise and create a comic-strip novel masterpiece.
— John Updike
The fiction writer is the ombudsman who argues our humble, dubious case in the halls of eternal record.
— John Updike
It comes to him: growth is betrayal. There is no other route. There is no arriving somewhere without leaving somewhere.
— John Updike
John Updike is always fun. And one of my former students, Tom Pynchon. And Harold Bloom, another former student.
— M.H. Abrams
It is easy to love people in memory; the hard thing is to love them when they are there in front of you.
— John Updike
How can you respect the world when you see it's being run by a bunch of kids turned old?
— John Updike
Sex is like money; only too much is enough.
— John Updike
We shed skins in life, to keep living.
— 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
Mozart's music gives us permission to live.
— John Updike
Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face.
— John Updike
Natural beauty is essentially temporary and sad, hence the impression of obscene mockery which artificial flowers give us.
— John Updike
Growth is betrayal.
— 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
He sounds to himself, saying this, like an impersonator; life, just as we first thought, is playing grownup.
— John Updike
Why does life feel, to us as we experience it, so desperately urgent and so utterly pointless at the same time?
— John Updike
My life is, in a sense, trash. My life is only that of which the residue is my writing.
— John Updike
You always find things you didn't know you were going to say, and that is the adventure ...
— John Updike
My only duty was to describe reality as it had come to me-to give the mundane its beautiful due.
— John Updike
Being on TV is like being alive, only more so.
— John Updike
My interest generally is the hidden Americans; the ones who live far away from the headlines.
— John Updike
What we need is progress with an escape hatch.
— John Updike
It's great to have an enemy. Sharpens your senses.
— 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
No act is so private it does not seek applause.
— John Updike
We must have sinned greatly, at some juncture long buried in our protozoic past, to deserve such a universe
— John Updike
Sun and moon, sun and moon, time goes.
— John Updike
The first breath of adultery is the freest; after it, constraints aping marriage develop.
— John Updike
Love makes the air light.
— John Updike
Nature refuses to rest.
— John Updike
Chaos is God's body. Order is the Devil's chains.
— 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
Being able to write becomes a kind of shield, a way of hiding, a way of too instantly transforming pain into honey.
— John Updike
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
In any interview, you do say more or less than you mean.
— John Updike
Russia is the only country of the world you can be homesick for while you're still in it.
— John Updike
