Quote

I'm willing to show good taste, if I can, in somebody else's living room, but our reading life is too short for a writer to be in any way polite. Since his words enter into another's brain in silence and intimacy, he should be as honest and explicit as we are with ourselves.

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
Writing
Since
Room
Way
Reading
Writer
Good
Show
Rooms
Explicit
Life
Words
Silence
Polite
Living
Willing
Intimacy
Shows
Honest
Enter
Else
Somebody
Short
Another
Brain
Taste

More quotes by John Updike

Image
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
Image
There are some women that don't do it for some men. That's why they turn out so many models.
John Updike
Image
The great thing about the dead, they make space.
John Updike
Image
Unlike the older, more humanly shaped arts, which begin with a seed and accumulate their form organically, photography clips its substance out of an actual continuum.
John Updike
Image
Being able to write becomes a kind of shield, a way of hiding, a way of too instantly transforming pain into honey.
John Updike
Image
Musicians are very mysterious and wonderful people to me I don't know how they do it.
John Updike
Image
The guarantee that our self enjoys an intended relation to the outer world is most, if not all, we ask from religion. God is the self projected onto reality by our natural and necessary optimism. He is the not-me personified.
John Updike
Image
By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.
John Updike
Image
Is not the decisive difference between comedy and tragedy that tragedy denies us another chance?
John Updike
Image
For male and female alike, the bodies of the other sex are messages signaling what we must do - they are glowing signifiers of our own necessities.
John Updike
Image
Affairs, ... , like everything else, ask too much.
John Updike
Image
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
Image
There was a beauty here bigger than the hurtling beauty of basketball, a beauty refined from country pastures, a game of solitariness, of waiting, waiting for the pitcher to complete his gaze toward first base and throw his lightning, a game whose very taste, of spit and dust and grass and sweat and leather and sun, was America.
John Updike
Image
School is where you go between when your parents can't take you and industry can't take you.
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
Photography is the first art wherein the tool does most of the work.
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 fact that we still live well cannot ease the feeling that we no longer live nobly.
John Updike
Image
But it seems to me that once you begin a gesture it's fatal not to go through with it.
John Updike
Image
One does not go to Moscow to get fat.
John Updike