Quote

The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.

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
Believes
Anywhere
Living
Sense
Else
True
Yorker
Believe
Kidding
People
Secretly

More quotes by John Updike

Image
The world keeps ending but new people too dumb to know it keep showing up as if the fun's just started.
John Updike
Image
The difficulty is, all swing thoughts decay, like radium. What burnt up the course on Wednesday has turned to lead on Sunday. Yet it does not do to have a blank mind: the terrible hugeness of the course will rush into the vacuum and the ball will spray like a thing berserk.
John Updike
Image
How can the planet keep turning and turning and not get so bored it explodes?
John Updike
Image
Affairs, ... , like everything else, ask too much.
John Updike
Image
What more fiendish proof of cosmic irresponsibility than a Nature which, having invented sex as a way to mix genes, then permits to arise, amid all its perfumed and hypnotic inducements to mate, a tireless tribe of spirochetes and viruses that torture and kill us for following orders?
John Updike
Image
Many men are more faithful to their golf partners than to their wives and have stuck with them longer.
John Updike
Image
America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy.
John Updike
Image
Mozart's music gives us permission to live.
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
Appealingness is inversely proportional to attainability.
John Updike
Image
Nothing feels worse than other people's good times.
John Updike
Image
American art in general... takes to surreal exaggerations and metaphors but its Puritan work ethic has little use for the playful self-indulgence behind Parisian Surrealism.
John Updike
Image
Yes, there is a ton of information on the web, but much of it is egregiously inaccurate, unedited, unattributed and juvenile.
John Updike
Image
Life is a video game. No matter how good you get, you are always zapped in the end.
John Updike
Image
Hemingway describes literary New York as a bottle full of tapeworms trying to feed on each other.
John Updike
Image
Everybody who tells you how to act has whiskey on their breath.
John Updike
Image
Government [is] an illusion the governed should not encourage.
John Updike
Image
We are fated to love one another we hardly exist outside our love, we are just animals without it, with a birth and a death and constant fear between. Our love has lifted us up , out of the dreadfulness of merely living.
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
The muttered hint, Remember, you have a stroke here, freezes my joints like a blast from Siberia.
John Updike