Home
Authors
Tags
App
Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App
" 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
Related Quotes:
" 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
" It is not an aesthetic misstep to make the viewer aware of the paint and the painter's hand. Such an empathetic awareness lies at the heart of aesthetic appreciation. "
John Updike
Appreciation
Paint
Heart
" 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
" Writers may be disreputable, incorrigible, early to decay or late to bloom but they dare to go it alone. "
John Updike
Early
Late
Go
" Americans have been conditioned to respect newness, whatever it costs them. "
John Updike
Whatever
Been
Costs
" I have never liked haircuts. "
John Updike
Liked
Haircuts
Never
" 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. "
John Updike
Sympathy
Understanding
Light
" Some stories or passages are more difficult and demand more fussing with than others, but, in general, I'm a two-draft writer rather than a six-draft writer, or whatever. "
John Updike
More
Difficult
Stories
" Art is like baby shoes. When you coat them with gold, they can no longer be worn. "
John Updike
Shoes
You
Art
" For whatever crispness and animation my writing has I give some credit to the cartoonist manque. "
John Updike
Credit
Writing
Whatever
" I love Shillington not as one loves Capri or New York, because they are special, but as one loves one's own body and consciousness, because they are synonymous with being. "
John Updike
New
Body
Love
" 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. "
John Updike
Other
Alike
Must
" 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. "
John Updike
Privacy
Man
Manifest
" Most of American life consists of driving somewhere and then returning home, wondering why the hell you went. "
John Updike
Driving
You
Life
" It is in middles that extremes clash, where ambiguity restlessly rules. "
John Updike
Where
Rules
Extremes
" What art offers is space - a certain breathing room for the spirit. "
John Updike
Space
Breathing
Room
" I suppose sequels are inevitable for a writer of a certain age. "
John Updike
Age
Writer
Sequels
" An affair wants to spill, to share its glory with the world. No act is so private it does not seek applause. "
John Updike
Glory
Seek
World
" In any interview, you do say more or less than you mean. "
John Updike
Interview
Less
Mean
" 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. "
John Updike
Sometimes
Speak
Speech
" Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right or better. "
John Updike
Doing
Right
Better
" 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.' "
John Updike
Said
Now
Myself
" 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. "
John Updike
Play
Relax
Moral
" A seventeenth-century house can be recognized by its steep roof, massive central chimney and utter porchlessness. Some of those houses have a second-story overhang, emphasizing their medieval look. "
John Updike
Look
Houses
Chimney
" America is beyond power; it acts as in a dream, as a face of God. Wherever America is, there is freedom, and wherever America is not, madness rules with chains, darkness strangles millions. Beneath her patient bombers, paradise is possible. "
John Updike
God
America
Darkness
" America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy. "
John Updike
You
Happy
Make
" A lot of the Koran does not speak very eloquently to a Westerner. Much of it is either legalistic or opaquely poetic. "
John Updike
Does
Much
Speak
" 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
" My life is, in a sense, trash. My life is only that of which the residue is my writing. "
John Updike
Sense
Life
Trash
" Somehow, it is hard to dislike a man once you have played a round of golf with him. "
John Updike
Hard
Dislike
Man