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Hope bases vast premises on foolish accidents, and reads a word where in fact only a scribble exists.

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
Bases
Exists
Scribble
Word
Scribbles
Fact
Premises
Hope
Reads
Facts
Vast
Accidents
Foolish

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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?
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Affairs, ... , like everything else, ask too much.
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Try to develop actual work habits, and even though you have a busy life, try to reserve an hour, say - or more - a day to write. Some very good things have been written on an hour a day.
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Of nothing but me I sing, lacking another song.
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Nothing feels worse than other people's good times.
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I'm somewhat shy about the brutal facts of being a carnivore. I don't like meat to look like animals. I prefer it in the form of sausages, hamburger and meat loaf, far removed from the living thing.
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Chaos is God's body. Order is the Devil's chains.
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When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas.
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The essence of government is concern for the widest possible public interest the essence of the humanities, it seems to me, is private study, thought, and passion. Publicity is a essential to the one as privacy is to the other.
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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.
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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.
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It's not up to us what we learn, but merely whether we learn through joy or through pain.
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To be President of the United States, sir, is to act as advocate for a blind, venomous, and ungrateful client.
John Updike
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We are cruel enough without meaning to be.
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It is not enough for a story to flow. It has to kind of trickle and glint as it crosses over the stones of the bare facts.
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The fact that we still live well cannot ease the feeling that we no longer live nobly.
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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.
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The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.
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All those little congruences and arabesques you prepared with such delicate anticipatory pleasure are gobbled up as if by pigs at a pastry cart.
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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.
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