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Four years was enough of Harvard. I still had a lot to learn, but had been given the liberating notion that now I could teach myself.
John Updike
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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
Learn
Given
Harvard
Stills
Liberating
Still
Notion
Enough
Learning
Years
Education
Teach
Four
More quotes by John Updike
We take our bearings, daily, from others. To be sane is, to a great extent, to be sociable.
John Updike
One does not go to Moscow to get fat.
John Updike
Hoping to fashion a mirror, the lover doth polish the face of his beloved until he produces a skull.
John Updike
Baseball is meant to be fun, and not all the solemn money-men in fur-collared greatcoats, not all the scruffy media cameramen and sour-faced reporters that crowd around the dugouts can quite smother the exhilarating spaciousness and grace of this impudently relaxed sport, a game of innumerable potential redemptions and curious disappointments.
John Updike
But it seems to me that once you begin a gesture it's fatal not to go through with it.
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
If she’d been born at the right time they would have burned her over in Salem.
John Updike
How sad, how strange, we make companions out of air and hurt them, so they will defy us, completing creation.
John Updike
We all begin life as parasites within the mother, and writers begin their existence imitatively, within the body of letters.
John Updike
Photography is the first art wherein the tool does most of the work.
John Updike
Inspiration arrives as a packet of material to be delivered.
John Updike
Museums and bookstores should feel, I think, like vacant lots - places where the demands on us are our own demands, where the spirit can find exercise in unsupervised play.
John Updike
Human was the music, natural was the static.
John Updike
The world keeps ending but new people too dumb to know it keep showing up as if the fun's just started.
John Updike
The creative writer uses his life as well as being its victim he can control, in his work, the self-presentation that in actuality is at the mercy of a thousand accidents.
John Updike
Hemingway describes literary New York as a bottle full of tapeworms trying to feed on each other.
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
I'm somewhat shy about the brutal facts of being a carnivore. I don't like meat to look like animals. I prefer it in the form of sausages, hamburger and meat loaf, far removed from the living thing.
John Updike
Within your own generation-the same songs, the same wars, the same attitudes toward those wars, the same rules and radio shows in the air-you can gauge the possibilities and impossibilities. With a person of another generation, you are treading water, playing with fire.
John Updike
I love my government not least for the extent to which it leaves me alone.
John Updike
