Quote

Now that I am sixty, I see why the idea of elder wisdom has passed from currency.

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
Passed
Aging
Wisdom
Age
Idea
Elder
Ideas
Elders
Time
Sixty
Currency

More quotes by John Updike

Image
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
Image
We take our bearings, daily, from others. To be sane is, to a great extent, to be sociable.
John Updike
Image
Wickedness was like food: once you got started it was hard to stop the gut expanded to take in more and more.
John Updike
Image
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
Image
Government is either organized benevolence or organized madness its peculiar magnitude permits no shading.
John Updike
Image
Being naked approaches being revolutionary going barefoot is mere populism.
John Updike
Image
Do what the heart commands. The heart is our only guide.
John Updike
Image
The muttered hint, Remember, you have a stroke here, freezes my joints like a blast from Siberia.
John Updike
Image
Government money in the arts, I fear, can only deflect artists from their responsibility to find an authentic market for their products.
John Updike
Image
The difference between a childhood and a boyhood must be this: our childhood is what we alone have had our boyhood is what any boy in our environment would have had.
John Updike
Image
We are each of us like our little blue planet, hung in black space, upheld by nothing but our mutual reassurances, our loving lies.
John Updike
Image
Life is a roller coaster, you have your ups and downs unless you fall off.
John Updike
Image
Let us not seek to make it less monstrous, for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty, lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are embarrassed by the miracle, and crushed by remonstrance.
John Updike
Image
How can the planet keep turning and turning and not get so bored it explodes?
John Updike
Image
Art is like baby shoes. When you coat them with gold, they can no longer be worn.
John Updike
Image
Men emerge pale from the little printing plant at four sharp, ghosts for an instant, blinking, until the outdoor light overcomes the look of constant indoor light clinging to them.
John Updike
Image
Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that's the stuff life is made of. Suspect each moment, for it is a thief, tiptoeing away with more than it brings.
John Updike
Image
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
Image
Life is like an overlong drama through which we sit being nagged by the vague memories of having read the reviews.
John Updike
Image
What seems to sell books is good word-of-mouth, not promotion tours. I'm too old to believe that media promotion of a book really matters. What matters is how it will look 100 years from now, not how many copies are sold.
John Updike