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The artist brings something into the world that didn't exist before, and he does it without destroying something else.
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
World
Brings
Exist
Artist
Else
Didn
Doe
Without
Something
Destroying
More quotes by John Updike
The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.
John Updike
We are each of us like our little blue planet, hung in black space, upheld by nothing but our mutual reassurances, our loving lies.
John Updike
The fact that we still live well cannot ease the feeling that we no longer live nobly.
John Updike
In a country this large and a language even larger ... there ought to be a living for somebody who cares and wants to entertain and instruct a reader.
John Updike
Let us not seek to make it less monstrous, for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty, lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are embarrassed by the miracle, and crushed by remonstrance.
John Updike
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
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.
John Updike
One of the nice things about having a lover, it makes you think about everything anew. The rest of your life becomes a kind of movie, flat and even rather funny.
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
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
Yes, there is a ton of information on the web, but much of it is egregiously inaccurate, unedited, unattributed and juvenile.
John Updike
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.
John Updike
The illusion is an agreement between the reader and writer that this [story] will be like life. The emotional temperature drops when you have footnotes.
John Updike
I love my government not least for the extent to which it leaves me alone.
John Updike
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.
John Updike
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
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
My only duty was to describe reality as it had come to me-to give the mundane its beautiful due.
John Updike
Art is like baby shoes. When you coat them with gold, they can no longer be worn.
John Updike
Smaller than a breadbox, bigger than a TV remote, the average book fits into the human hand with a seductive nestling, a kiss of texture, whether of cover cloth, glazed jacket, or flexible paperback.
John Updike
