Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" American art in general... takes to surreal exaggerations and metaphors; but its Puritan work ethic has little use for the playful self-indulgence behind Parisian Surrealism. "

Related Quotes:

" 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

Life

Faith

My Life

" I feel old only when I look at my hands or at myself in the mirror. "

" My reading as a child was lazy and cowardly, and it is yet. I was afraid of encountering, in a book, something I didn't want to know. "

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

" 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. "

" Hobbies take place in the cellar and smell of airplane glue. "

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

" In my first 15 or 20 years of authorship, I was almost never asked to give a speech or an interview. The written work was supposed to speak for itself, and to sell itself, sometimes even without the author's photograph on the back flap. "

" Memories, impressions and emotions from the first 20 years on earth are most writers' main material; little that comes afterward is quite so rich and resonant. "

" When I went away to college, I marveled at the wealth of bookstores around Harvard Square. "

" For many years, I read mystery novels for relaxation. But my tastes were too narrow - and, having read all of Agatha Christie and John Dickson Carr, I discovered that the implausibility and the thinness of the people distracted me unduly from the plot. "

John Updike

Plot

Having

" Golf's ultimate moral instruction directs us to find within ourselves a pivotal center of enjoyment: relax into a rhythm that fits the hills and swales, and play the shot at hand - not the last one, or the next one, but the one at your feet, in the poison ivy, where you put it. "

" Baseball skills schizophrenically encompass a pitcher's, a batter's and a fielder's. "

" I seem most instinctively to believe in the human value of creative writing, whether in the form of verse or fiction, as a mode of truth-telling, self-expression and homage to the twin miracles of creation and consciousness. "

" Existence itself does not feel horrible; it feels like an ecstasy, rather, which we have only to be still to experience. "

John Updike

Existence

Experience

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

" We don't really want to think that the artist is only very skilled, that he has merely devoted his life to perfecting a certain set of intelligible skills. "

" The Internet doesn't like you to learn too much about explosives. "

" I have never liked haircuts. "

" By the mid-17th century, telescopes had improved enough to make visible the seasonally growing and shrinking polar ice caps on Mars, and features such as Syrtis Major, a dark patch thought to be a shallow sea. "

" The writers we tend to universally admire, like Beckett, or Kafka, or TS Eliot, are not very prolific. "

John Updike

Prolific

Tend

" Sometimes it seems the whole purpose of pets is to bring death into the house. "

" My transition from wanting to be a cartoonist to wanting to be a writer may have come about through that friendly opposition, that even-handed pairing, of pictures and words. "

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

" Old age treats freelance writers pretty gently. "

" The theme of old age doesn't seem to fascinate Hollywood. "

" I was raised in the Depression, when there was a great sense of dog-eat-dog and people fighting over scraps. "

" I love my government not least for the extent to which it leaves me alone. "

" 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. "

" Rain is grace; rain is the sky descending to the earth; without rain, there would be no life. "