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From infancy on, we are all spies the shame is not this but that the secrets to be discovered are so paltry and few.
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
Secrets
Discovered
Shame
Secret
Literature
Paltry
Spies
Spy
Infancy
More quotes by John Updike
Golf camaraderie, like that of astronauts and Antarctic explorers, is based on a common experience of transcendence fat or thin, scratch or duffer, we have been somerwhere together where non-golfers never go.
John Updike
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
Women, fire in their crotch, won't burn out, begin by fighting off pricks, end by going wild hunting for one that still works.
John Updike
All those little congruences and arabesques you prepared with such delicate anticipatory pleasure are gobbled up as if by pigs at a pastry cart.
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
We are cruel enough without meaning to be.
John Updike
School is where you go between when your parents can't take you and industry can't take you.
John Updike
To be President of the United States, sir, is to act as advocate for a blind, venomous, and ungrateful client.
John Updike
The yearning for an afterlife is the opposite of selfish: it is love and praise for the world that we are privileged, in this complex interval of light, to witness and experience.
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
It is not enough for a story to flow. It has to kind of trickle and glint as it crosses over the stones of the bare facts.
John Updike
Dream golf is simply golf played on another course. We chip from glass tables onto moving stairways we swing in a straightjacket, through masses of cobweb, and awaken not with any sense of unjust hazard but only with a regret that the round can never be completed, and that one of our phantasmal companions has kept the scorecard.
John Updike
Government is either organized benevolence or organized madness its peculiar magnitude permits no shading.
John Updike
In all the green world nothing feels as good as a woman's good nature.
John Updike
Looking foolish does the spirit good. The need not to look foolish is one of youth's many burdens as we get older we are exempted from more and more.
John Updike
The difficulty with humorists is that they will mix what they believe with what they don't whichever seems likelier to win an effect.
John Updike
Being naked approaches being revolutionary going barefoot is mere populism.
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
New York is of course many cities, and an exile does not return to the one he left.
John Updike
Everybody who tells you how to act has whiskey on their breath.
John Updike
