Quote

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

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
Gold
Baby
Longer
Art
Like
Coat
Coats
Worn
Shoes

More quotes by John Updike

Image
President George] Bush talked to us like we were a bunch of morons and we ate it up. Can you imagine, the Pledge of Allegiance, read my lips-can you imagine such crap in this day and age?
John Updike
Image
A cynic is a kind of romantic who has aged.
John Updike
Image
There is always a chance of failure, of producing something totally unnecessary. But I guess that chance of failure is what makes tightrope walking, race-car driving.
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
Being naked approaches being revolutionary going barefoot is mere populism.
John Updike
Image
In no other sport must the spectator move.
John Updike
Image
The world keeps ending but new people too dumb to know it keep showing up as if the fun's just started.
John Updike
Image
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
Image
I'm willing to show good taste, if I can, in somebody else's living room, but our reading life is too short for a writer to be in any way polite. Since his words enter into another's brain in silence and intimacy, he should be as honest and explicit as we are with ourselves.
John Updike
Image
When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas.
John Updike
Image
The stripped and shapely Maple grieves The ghosts of her Departed leaves. The ground is hard, As hard as stone. The year is old, The birds are flown.
John Updike
Image
Man is a means for turning things into spirit and turning spirit into things.
John Updike
Image
But it seems to me that once you begin a gesture it's fatal not to go through with it.
John Updike
Image
The New England spirit does not seek solutions in a crowd raw light and solitariness are less dreaded than welcomed as enhancers of our essential selves.
John Updike
Image
Art imitates Nature in this not to dare is to dwindle.
John Updike
Image
The muttered hint, Remember, you have a stroke here, freezes my joints like a blast from Siberia.
John Updike
Image
Our lives fade behind us before we die.
John Updike
Image
We are fated to love one another we hardly exist outside our love, we are just animals without it, with a birth and a death and constant fear between. Our love has lifted us up , out of the dreadfulness of merely living.
John Updike
Image
Of nothing but me I sing, lacking another song.
John Updike
Image
Hope bases vast premises on foolish accidents, and reads a word where in fact only a scribble exists.
John Updike