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Museums and bookstores should feel, I think, like vacant lots - places where the demands on us are our own demands, where the spirit can find exercise in unsupervised play.

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
Play
Museums
Feel
Demands
Feels
Lots
Think
Places
Thinking
Demand
Like
Exercise
Unsupervised
Spirit
Vacant
Find
Bookstores

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It is easy to love people in memory the hard thing is to love them when they are there in front of you.
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The world keeps ending but new people too dumb to know it keep showing up as if the fun's just started.
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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?
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I love my government not least for the extent to which it leaves me alone.
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The Founding Fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called an education.
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Movies are, like sharp sunlight, merciless we do not imagine, we view.
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America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy.
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You do things and do things and nobody really has a clue.
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Until the 20th century it was generally assumed that a writer had said what he had to say in his works.
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I must go to Nature disarmed of perspective and stretch myself like a large transparent canvas upon her in the hope that, my submission being perfect, the imprint of a beautiful and useful truth would be taken.
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The muttered hint, Remember, you have a stroke here, freezes my joints like a blast from Siberia.
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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.
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Families, doing everything for each other out of imagined obligation and always getting in each other's way, what a tangle.
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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.
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A photograph presents itself not only as a visual representation, but as evidence, more convincing than a painting because of the unimpeachable mechanical means whereby it was made. We do not trust the artist's flattering hand but we do trust film, and shadows, and light.
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Nothing feels worse than other people's good times.
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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.
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Suddenly summoned to witness something great and horrendous, we keep fighting not to reduce it to our own smallness.
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Women, fire in their crotch, won't burn out, begin by fighting off pricks, end by going wild hunting for one that still works.
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The measure of artistic merit is the length to which a writer is willing to go in following his own compulsions.
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