John Updike quotes - page 3

I would especially like to recourt the Muse of poetry, who ran off with the mailman four years ago, and drops me only a scribbled postcard from time to time. (John Updike)
Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right or better. View quote
John Updike
It is not difficult to deceive the first time, for the deceived possesses no antibodies unvaccinated by suspicion, she overlooks lateness, accepts absurd excuses, permits the flimsiest patching to repair great rents in the quotidian. View quote
John Updike
In asking forgiveness of women for our mythologizing of their bodies, for being unreal about them, we can only appeal to their own sexuality, which is different but not basically different, perhaps, from our own. For women, too, there seems to be that tangle of supplication and possessiveness, that descent toward infantile undifferentiation, that omnipotent helplessness, that merger with the cosmic mother-warmth, that flushed pulse-quickened leap into overestimation, projection, general mix-up. View quote
John Updike
I secretly understood the primitive appeal of the hearth. Television is-its irresistible charm-a fire. View quote
John Updike
When we try in good faith to believe in materialism, in the exclusive reality of the physical, we are asking our selves to step aside we are disavowing the very realm where we exist and where all things precious are kept -- the realm of emotion and conscience, of memory and intention and sensation. View quote
John Updike
Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face. As soon as one is aware of being somebody, to be watched and listened to with extra interest, input ceases, and the performer goes blind and deaf in his over animation. One can either see or be seen. View quote
John Updike
To say that war is madness is like saying that sex is madness true enough, from the standpoint of a stateless eunuch, but merely a provocative epigram for those who must make their arrangements in the world as given. View quote
John Updike
Writers take words seriously-perha ps the last professional class that does-and they struggle to steer their own through the crosswinds of meddling editors and careless typesetters and obtuse and malevolent reviewers into the lap of the ideal reader. View quote
John Updike
Most of American life consists of driving somewhere and then returning home, wondering why the hell you went. View quote
John Updike
To be President of the United States, sir, is to act as advocate for a blind, venomous, and ungrateful client. (John Updike)
If you have the guts to be yourself, other people'll pay your price. View quote
John Updike
Looking foolish does the spirit good. The need not to look foolish is one of youth's many burdens as we get older we are exempted from more and more, and float upward in our heedlessness, singing Gratia Dei sum quod sum. View quote
John Updike
Time is our element, not a mistaken invader. View quote
John Updike
The city overwhelmed our expectations. The Kiplingesque grandeur of Waterloo Station, the Eliotic despondency of the brick row in Chelsea the Dickensian nightmare of fog and sweating pavement and besmirched cornices. View quote
John Updike
There is this quality in things, of the Right was seeming Wrong at first. To test our faith. View quote
John Updike
At last, small witches, goblins, hags, And pirates armed with paper bags, Their costumes hinged on safety pins, Go haunt a night of pumpkin grins. View quote
John Updike
I must go to Nature disarmed of perspective and stretch myself like a large transparent canvas upon her in the hope that, my submission being perfect, the imprint of a beautiful and useful truth would be taken. View quote
John Updike
The great thing about the dead, they make space. View quote
John Updike
It rots a writer's brain, it cretinises you. You say the same thing again and again, and when you do that happily you're well on the way to being a cretin. Or a politician. View quote
John Updike
He skates saucily over great tracts of confessed ignorance. (John Updike)
The yearning for an afterlife is the opposite of selfish: it is love and praise for the world that we are privileged, in this complex interval of light, to witness and experience. View quote
John Updike
It was one of history's great love stories, the mutually profitable romance which Hollywood and bohunk America conducted almost in the dark, a tapping of fervent messages through the wall of the San Gabriel Range. View quote
John Updike
Her sentences march under a harsh sun that bleaches color from them but bestows a peculiar, invigorating, Pascalian clarity. View quote
John Updike
I moved to New England partly because it has a real literary past. The ghosts of Hawthorne and Melville still sit on those green hills. The worship of Mammon is also somewhat lessened there by the spirit of irony. I don't get hay fever in New England either. View quote
John Updike