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
Aging
Wisdom
Age
Idea
Elder
Ideas
Elders
Time
Sixty
Currency
Passed

More quotes by John Updike

Image
Life is a nacho. It can be yummy-crunchy or squishy-yucky. It just depends on how long it takes for you to start eating it.
John Updike
Image
The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.
John Updike
Image
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
Image
To be human is to be in the tense condition of a death-foreseeing, consciously libidinous animal. No other earthly creature suffers such a capacity for thought, such a complexity of envisioned but frustrated possibilities, such a troubling ability to question the tribal and biological imperatives.
John Updike
Image
All love is betrayal, in that it flatters life. The loveless man is best armed.
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
The - writing is a kind of act of aggression, and a person who is not aggressive in his normal, may I say, intercourse with humanity might well be an aggressive writer.
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
The first breathe of adultery is the freest.
John Updike
Image
Everybody who tells you how to act has whiskey on their breath.
John Updike
Image
The other sad truth about golf spectatorship is that for today's pros it all comes down to the putting, and that the difference between a putt that drops and one that rims the cup, though teleologically enormous, is intellectually negligeable.
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
One does not go to Moscow to get fat.
John Updike
Image
Appealingness is inversely proportional to attainability.
John Updike
Image
There's always something new by looking at the same thing over and over.
John Updike
Image
Revolution is just one crowd taking power from another.
John Updike
Image
Inspiration arrives as a packet of material to be delivered.
John Updike
Image
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
Image
Until the 20th century it was generally assumed that a writer had said what he had to say in his works.
John Updike
Image
Art is like baby shoes. When you coat them with gold, they can no longer be worn.
John Updike