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We take our bearings, daily, from others. To be sane is, to a great extent, to be sociable.
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
Sociable
Sane
Extent
Daily
Others
Take
Great
Bearings
More quotes by John Updike
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
You imagine a reader and try to keep the reader interested. That's storytelling. You also hope to reward the reader with a sense of a completed design, that somebody is in charge, and that while life is pointless, the book isn't pointless. The author knows where he is going. That's form.
John Updike
In no other sport must the spectator move.
John Updike
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
Fiction is nothing less than the subtlest instrument for self-examination and self-display that Mankind has invented yet.
John Updike
There is no doubt that I have lots of words inside me but at moments, like rush-hour traffic at the mouth of a tunnel, they jam.
John Updike
The great thing about the dead, they make space.
John Updike
Art imitates Nature in this not to dare is to dwindle.
John Updike
Families, doing everything for each other out of imagined obligation and always getting in each other's way, what a tangle.
John Updike
All love is betrayal, in that it flatters life. The loveless man is best armed.
John Updike
Professionalism in art has this difficulty: To be professional is to be dependable, to be dependable is to be predictable, and predictability is esthetically boring - an anti-virtue in a field where we hope to be astonished and startled and at some deep level refreshed.
John Updike
Suddenly summoned to witness something great and horrendous, we keep fighting not to reduce it to our own smallness.
John Updike
The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.
John Updike
Life is a razor, you are always in hot water or a scrape.
John Updike
Movies took you right up to the edge but kept you safe.
John Updike
But it is just two lovers, holding hands and in a hurry to reach their car, their locked hands a starfish leaping through the dark.
John Updike
Among the repulsions of atheism for me has been its drastic un-interestingness as an intellectual position. Where was the ingenuity, the ambiguity, the humanity of saying that the universe just happened to happen and that when we're dead we're dead?
John Updike
School is where you go between when your parents can't take you and industry can't take you.
John Updike
I am sometimes visited by the heretical thought that there is no such thing as good and bad architecture, any more than there is good and bad nature. It is all in where you stand at the time.
John Updike
The Englishman is under no constitutional obligation to believe that all men are created equal. The American agony is therefore scarcely intelligible, like a saint's self-flagellation viewed by an atheist.
John Updike
