Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
The first breath of adultery is the freest after it, constraints aping marriage develop.
John Updike
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
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
Breath
Breaths
Develop
Marriage
Aping
Firsts
Freest
First
Constrain
Adultery
Constraints
More quotes by John Updike
Art imitates Nature in this not to dare is to dwindle.
John Updike
Life is like an overlong drama through which we sit being nagged by the vague memories of having read the reviews.
John Updike
Chaos is God's body. Order is the Devil's chains.
John Updike
What more fiendish proof of cosmic irresponsibility than a Nature which, having invented sex as a way to mix genes, then permits to arise, amid all its perfumed and hypnotic inducements to mate, a tireless tribe of spirochetes and viruses that torture and kill us for following orders?
John Updike
Being able to write becomes a kind of shield, a way of hiding, a way of too instantly transforming pain into honey.
John Updike
All love is betrayal, in that it flatters life. The loveless man is best armed.
John Updike
There is the fear that you somehow neglected to say what was really yours to say.
John Updike
Our lives fade behind us before we die.
John Updike
A photograph presents itself not only as a visual representation, but as evidence, more convincing than a painting because of the unimpeachable mechanical means whereby it was made. We do not trust the artist's flattering hand but we do trust film, and shadows, and light.
John Updike
A leader is one who, out of madness or goodness, volunteers to take upon himself the woe of the people. There are few men so foolish, hence the erratic quality of leadership in the world.
John Updike
What art offers is space - a certain breathing room for the spirit.
John Updike
The fact that we still live well cannot ease the feeling that we no longer live nobly.
John Updike
You have a life and there are these volumes on either side that go unvisited some day soon as the world winds he will lie beneath what he now stands on, dead as those insects whose sound he no longer hears, and the grass will go on growing, wild and blind.
John Updike
Movies are, like sharp sunlight, merciless we do not imagine, we view.
John Updike
Nothing seems to matter quite as much. I no longer think about death in the concentrated way I once did. I don't know? you get so old and you sort of give up in some way. You've had your period of angst, your period of religious desperation, and you've arrived at a philosophical position where you don't need, or you can't bear, to look at it.
John Updike
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
The measure of artistic merit is the length to which a writer is willing to go in following his own compulsions.
John Updike
In general, the churches, visited by me often on weekdays... bore for me the same relation to God that billboards did to Coca-Cola they promoted thirst without quenching it.
John Updike
Children are not a zoo of entertainingly exotic creatures, but an array of mirrors in which the human predicament leaps out at us.
John Updike
Musicians are very mysterious and wonderful people to me I don't know how they do it.
John Updike
