Quote

Inspiration arrives as a packet of material to be delivered.

John Updike

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

John Updike
Age: 76 †
Born: 1932
Born: March 18
Died: 2009
Died: January 27
Art Critic
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
John Hoyer Updike
Literature
Packet
Arrives
Delivered
Material
Materials
Inspiration

More quotes by John Updike

Image
Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right or better.
John Updike
Image
You do things and do things and nobody really has a clue.
John Updike
Image
Mozart's music gives us permission to live.
John Updike
Image
Government is either organized benevolence or organized madness its peculiar magnitude permits no shading.
John Updike
Image
The difficulty is, all swing thoughts decay, like radium. What burnt up the course on Wednesday has turned to lead on Sunday. Yet it does not do to have a blank mind: the terrible hugeness of the course will rush into the vacuum and the ball will spray like a thing berserk.
John Updike
Image
The Florida sun seems not much a single thing overhead but a set of klieg lights that pursue you everywhere with an even white illumination.
John Updike
Image
Being able to write becomes a kind of shield, a way of hiding, a way of too instantly transforming pain into honey.
John Updike
Image
Fraud makes the world go round.
John Updike
Image
A narrative is like a room on whose walls a number of false doors have been painted while within the narrative, we have many apparent choices of exit, but when the author leads us to one particular door, we know it is the right one because it opens.
John Updike
Image
How can you respect the world when you see it's being run by a bunch of kids turned old?
John Updike
Image
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
Image
In a country this large and a language even larger ... there ought to be a living for somebody who cares and wants to entertain and instruct a reader.
John Updike
Image
How sad, how strange, we make companions out of air and hurt them, so they will defy us, completing creation.
John Updike
Image
What seems to sell books is good word-of-mouth, not promotion tours. I'm too old to believe that media promotion of a book really matters. What matters is how it will look 100 years from now, not how many copies are sold.
John Updike
Image
I was made to feel I could do things. If you get this feeling early and can hold it until you're 15, you tend to never lose it.
John Updike
Image
If she’d been born at the right time they would have burned her over in Salem.
John Updike
Image
There is no such thing as static happiness. Happiness is a mixed thing, a thing compounded of sacrifices, and losses, and betrayals.
John Updike
Image
Is not the decisive difference between comedy and tragedy that tragedy denies us another chance?
John Updike
Image
I love my government not least for the extent to which it leaves me alone.
John Updike
Image
A cynic is a kind of romantic who has aged.
John Updike