- Dazzling
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- Nov 07, 2020
John Updike Quotes
Most Famous John Updike Quotes of All Time!
We have created a collection of some of the best john-updike quotes so you can read and share anytime with your friends and family. Share our Top 10 John Updike Quotes on Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest.
- Last Updated on May 30, 2021
- Go
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- Nov 07, 2020
Writers may be disreputable, incorrigible, early to decay or late to bloom but they dare to go it alone.
- Assumed
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- Nov 07, 2020
Until the 20th century it was generally assumed that a writer had said what he had to say in his works.
- Old
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- Nov 07, 2020
The inner spaces that a good story lets us enter are the old apartments of religion.
- Doors
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- Nov 07, 2020
A narrative is like a room on whose walls a number of false doors have been painted; while within the narrative, we have many apparent choices of exit, but when the author leads us to one particular door, we know it is the right one because it opens.
- Poet
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Hell
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- Nov 07, 2020
Most of American life consists of driving somewhere and then returning home, wondering why the hell you went.
- Nature
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- Nov 07, 2020
Dreams come true; without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them.
- Conspiracy
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- Nov 07, 2020
America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy.
- Gold
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- Nov 07, 2020
Art is like baby shoes. When you coat them with gold, they can no longer be worn.
- Like
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- Nov 07, 2020
Sex is like money; only too much is enough.
- Love
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- Nov 07, 2020
We are most alive when we're in love.
- Innocent
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- Nov 07, 2020
The essential self is innocent, and when it tastes its own innocence knows that it lives for ever.
- Poetry
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- Nov 07, 2020
Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.
- Creativity
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- Nov 07, 2020
Creativity is merely a plus name for regular activity. Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right, or better.
- Learner
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- Nov 07, 2020
Every marriage tends to consist of an aristocrat and a peasant. Of a teacher and a learner.
- Encouragement
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- Nov 07, 2020
The essential support and encouragement comes from within, arising out of the mad notion that your society needs to know what only you can tell it.
- Glowing
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- Nov 07, 2020
For male and female alike, the bodies of the other sex are messages signaling what we must do, they are glowing signifiers of our own necessities.
- New
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- Nov 07, 2020
There is no pleasing New Englanders, my dear, their soil is all rocks and their hearts are bloodless absolutes.
- Government
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- Nov 07, 2020
I love my government not least for the extent to which it leaves me alone.
- Heaven
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Feel
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- Nov 07, 2020
Existence itself does not feel horrible; it feels like an ecstasy, rather, which we have only to be still to experience.
- Like
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- Nov 07, 2020
Truth should not be forced; it should simply manifest itself, like a woman who has in her privacy reflected and coolly decided to bestow herself upon a certain man.
- Applause
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- Nov 07, 2020
An affair wants to spill, to share its glory with the world. No act is so private it does not seek applause.
- Breath
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- Nov 07, 2020
The first breath of adultery is the freest; after it, constraints aping marriage develop.
- Eating
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Education
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- Nov 07, 2020
The Founding Fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called an education.
- Few Men
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- Nov 07, 2020
A leader is one who, out of madness or goodness, volunteers to take upon himself the woe of the people. There are few men so foolish, hence the erratic quality of leadership in the world.
- Blind
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- Nov 07, 2020
To be President of the United States, sir, is to act as advocate for a blind, venomous, and ungrateful client.
- Either
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- Nov 07, 2020
Government is either organized benevolence or organized madness; its peculiar magnitude permits no shading.
- Change
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- Nov 07, 2020
Customs and convictions change; respectable people are the last to know, or to admit, the change, and the ones most offended by fresh reflections of the facts in the mirror of art.
- Fighting
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- Nov 07, 2020
I was raised in the Depression, when there was a great sense of dog-eat-dog and people fighting over scraps.
- Haven
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- Nov 07, 2020
Reagan has turned America into a tax haven.
- Nov 07, 2020
My actinic keratosis is a result of the triumphalism of the beach. The sun exacerbates it.
- Day
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- Nov 07, 2020
A number of American colleges are willing to pay a tempting amount to pinch and poke an author for a day or two.
- Either
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- Nov 07, 2020
A lot of the Koran does not speak very eloquently to a Westerner. Much of it is either legalistic or opaquely poetic.
- Call
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- Nov 07, 2020
Arabic is very twisting, very beautiful. The call to prayer is quite haunting; it almost makes you a believer on the spot.
- Mentality
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- Nov 07, 2020
I didn't need to write historical epics, no, or science fiction, though I read a lot of science fiction as a kid and rather liked it. But I didn't have the mentality.
- Nov 07, 2020
I was trying to support a family with writing. I didn't have a private income. I had no other profession.
- Money
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- Nov 07, 2020
I think my first story sold for $550. This was in 1954, and it seemed like quite a lot of money, and I said to myself, 'Hey, I'm a professional writer now.'
- Stupid
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- Nov 07, 2020
I know more about what it's like to be elderly and infirm and kind of stupid, the way you get forgetful, but on the other hand I'm a littler, wiser, dare we say? The word 'wisdom' has kind of faded out of our vocabulary, but yeah, I'm a little wiser.
- Moment
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Men
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- Nov 07, 2020
What interests me is why men think of women as witches. It's because they're so fascinating and exasperating, so other.
- Dreams
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- Nov 07, 2020
To be a human being is to be in a state of tension between your appetites and your dreams, and the social realities around you and your obligations to your fellow man.
- Human
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- Nov 07, 2020
I'm trying to get the terrorist out of the bugaboo category and into the category of a fellow human being.
- Live
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- Nov 07, 2020
I never really made a choice to live in America, so I should be aware of the social strata outside of the ones that I may live in.
- Hidden
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- Nov 07, 2020
My interest generally is the hidden Americans; the ones who live far away from the headlines.
- Emerges
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- Nov 07, 2020
In fiction, imaginary people become realer to us than any named celebrity glimpsed in a series of rumored events, whose causes and subtler ramifications must remain in the dark. An invented figure like Anna Karenina or Emma Bovary emerges fully into the light of understanding, which brings with it identification, sympathy and pity.
- Last
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- Nov 07, 2020
We do survive every moment, after all, except the last one.
- Conditioned
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- Nov 07, 2020
Americans have been conditioned to respect newness, whatever it costs them.
- Creative
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- Nov 07, 2020
Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right or better.
- Golf
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- Nov 07, 2020
Golf appeals to the idiot in us and the child. Just how childlike golf players become is proven by their frequent inability to count past five.
- Myself
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- Nov 07, 2020
Four years was enough of Harvard. I still had a lot to learn, but had been given the liberating notion that now I could teach myself.
- Each Year
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- Nov 07, 2020
A healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people's patience.
- Nov 07, 2020