Home
Authors
Tags
App
Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App
" For a long time, I was under the impression that 'Terry and the Pirates' was the best comic strip in the United States. "
John Updike
Best
Time
Impression
Related Quotes:
" I was an only child. I needed an alternative to family life - to real life, you could almost say - and cartoons, pictures in a book, the animated movies, seemed to provide it. "
John Updike
Life
Book
Movies
" Rain is grace; rain is the sky descending to the earth; without rain, there would be no life. "
John Updike
Earth
Grace
Rain
" Inspiration arrives as a packet of material to be delivered. "
John Updike
Brainy
Delivered
Inspiration
" 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. "
John Updike
Artist
Only
Skills
" 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
Eating
Men
" Perhaps I have written fiction because everything unambiguously expressed seems somehow crass to me; and when the subject is myself, I want to jeer and weep. "
John Updike
Me
Everything
Because
" Mars has long exerted a pull on the human imagination. The erratically moving red star in the sky was seen as sinister or violent by the ancients: The Greeks identified it with Ares, the god of war; the Babylonians named it after Nergal, god of the underworld. To the ancient Chinese, it was Ying-huo, the fire planet. "
John Updike
God
War
Sky
" 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
" The refusal to rest content, the willingness to risk excess on behalf of one's obsessions, is what distinguishes artists from entertainers, and what makes some artists adventurers on behalf of us all. "
John Updike
Excess
Us
Some
" I've always tried to write about America. It's very worth a writer's effort. "
John Updike
Effort
Worth
Write
" It's sort of good to see your vocation as a daily task and have fairly modest expectations for financial or reward in other coin - glory, love, whatever. "
John Updike
Daily
Financial
Good
" Being naked approaches being revolutionary; going barefoot is mere populism. "
John Updike
Going
Barefoot
Being
" The theme of old age doesn't seem to fascinate Hollywood. "
John Updike
Hollywood
Theme
Age
" 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. "
John Updike
Myself
Now
Enough
" 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
Know
Trying
Thought
" A Christian novelist tries to describe the world as it is. "
John Updike
World
Tries
Describe
" 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. "
John Updike
Idiot
Golf
Child
" 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. "
John Updike
Transition
Pictures
Words
" 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. "
John Updike
Say
Stupid
Kind
" 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. "
John Updike
Emotions
Memories
Rich
" A person believes various things at various times, even on the same day. "
John Updike
Even
Person
Same
" Some golfers, we are told, enjoy the landscape; but properly, the landscape shrivels and compresses into the grim, surrealistically vivid patch of grass directly under the golfer's eyes as he morosely walks toward where he thinks his ball might be. "
John Updike
Eyes
Enjoy
Ball
" In art, anything goes, and if it goes, it goes. "
John Updike
Art
Anything
Goes
" The first author I met socially was Joyce Cary. "
John Updike
Met
Author
First
" 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
Nothing
Heaven
End
" 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. "
John Updike
American
Behind
Work
" The essential self is innocent, and when it tastes its own innocence knows that it lives for ever. "
John Updike
Knows
Self
Own
" I love my government not least for the extent to which it leaves me alone. "
John Updike
Government
Alone
Leaves
" Does fiction, artistic writing, have much of a future? I must say it's on the way out. "
John Updike
Say
Future
Much
" My actinic keratosis is a result of the triumphalism of the beach. The sun exacerbates it. "
John Updike
Beach
Result
Sun