Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy.
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
Happy
Inspirational
Truth
America
Make
Conspiracy
Vast
More quotes by John Updike
The Englishman is under no constitutional obligation to believe that all men are created equal. The American agony is therefore scarcely intelligible, like a saint's self-flagellation viewed by an atheist.
John Updike
Being naked approaches being revolutionary going barefoot is mere populism.
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
Hope bases vast premises on foolish accidents, and reads a word where in fact only a scribble exists.
John Updike
Prose should have a flow, the forward momentum of a certain energized weight it should feel like a voice tumbling in your ear.
John Updike
Why does one never hear of government funding for the preservation and encouragement of comic strips, girlie magazines and TV soap operas? Because these genres still hold the audience they were created to amuse and instruct.
John Updike
There is this quality, in things, of the right way seeming wrong at first.
John Updike
Pressed, I would define spirituality as the shadow of light humanity casts as it moves through the darkness of everything that can be explained.
John Updike
Hemingway describes literary New York as a bottle full of tapeworms trying to feed on each other.
John Updike
Until the 20th century it was generally assumed that a writer had said what he had to say in his works.
John Updike
If you're telling me I'm not mature, that's one thing I don't cry over since as far as I can make out it's the same thing as being dead.
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
The muttered hint, Remember, you have a stroke here, freezes my joints like a blast from Siberia.
John Updike
Customs and convictions change respectable people are the last to know, or to admit, the change, and the ones most offended by fresh reflections of the facts in the mirror of art.
John Updike
Professionalism in art has this difficulty: To be professional is to be dependable, to be dependable is to be predictable, and predictability is esthetically boring - an anti-virtue in a field where we hope to be astonished and startled and at some deep level refreshed.
John Updike
The scrape and snap of Keds on loose alley pebbles seems to catapult their voices high into the moist March air blue above the wires.
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
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.
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
A writer's self-consciousness, for which he is much scorned, is really a mode of interestedness, that inevitably turns outward.
John Updike
