Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" We're past the age of heroes and hero kings... Most of our lives are basically mundane and dull, and it's up to the writer to find ways to make them interesting. "

John Updike

Age

Interesting

Hero

Related Quotes:

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

" My life is, in a sense, trash. My life is only that of which the residue is my writing. "

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

" Belief, like love, must be voluntary. "

" 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. "

" A house, having been willfully purchased and furnished, tells us more than a body, and its description is a foremost resource of the art of fiction. "

John Updike

Resource

House

" Dreams come true; without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them. "

" Religion enables us to ignore nothingness and get on with the jobs of life. "

John Updike

Religion

Ignore

" I find in my own writing that only fiction - and rarely, a poem - fully tests me to the kind of limits of what I know and what I feel. "

John Updike

Limits

Writing

" My complaint, as an exile who once loved New York and who likes to return a half-dozen times a year, is not that it plays host to extremes of the human condition: There is grandeur in that, and necessity. "

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

" John Barth, I think, was really a writer of my own age and somewhat of my own temperament, although his books are very different from mine, and he has been a spokesman for the very ambitious, long, rather academic novel. But I don't think that what he is saying, so far as I understand it, is so very different from what I'm saying. "

" The inner spaces that a good story lets us enter are the old apartments of religion. "

John Updike

Inner

Good

" My first ambition was to be an animator for Walt Disney. Then I wanted to be a magazine cartoonist. "

" Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea. "

" I don't write about too many male businessmen, and I'm not apt to write about too many female businessmen. "

" 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. "

" What art offers is space - a certain breathing room for the spirit. "

" The rich - they just live in another realm, really. "

" Art is like baby shoes. When you coat them with gold, they can no longer be worn. "

" I don't think women are dumb. "

" Tiger Woods did not always win majors with ease; after his narrow victory in the 1999 PGA, he slumped and sighed as if he'd been carrying rocks uphill all afternoon. "

" In art, anything goes, and if it goes, it goes. "

" Americans have been conditioned to respect newness, whatever it costs them. "

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

" A room containing Philip Roth, I have noticed, begins hilariously to whirl and pulse with a mix of rebelliousness and constriction that I take to be Oedipal. "

" New York, like the Soviet Union, has this universal usefulness: It makes you glad you live elsewhere. "

John Updike

New

You

" The reader knows the writer better than he knows himself; but the writer's physical presence is light from a star that has moved on. "

" A lot of the Koran does not speak very eloquently to a Westerner. Much of it is either legalistic or opaquely poetic. "

" In a city like New York, you're aware of the rich and poor. "