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Looking foolish does the spirit good. The need not to look foolish is one of youth's many burdens as we get older we are exempted from more and more.
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
Looks
Foolish
Need
Burden
Many
Older
Needs
Youth
Good
Looking
Spirit
Doe
Exempted
Look
Burdens
More quotes by John Updike
Writers take words seriously-perha ps the last professional class that does-and they struggle to steer their own through the crosswinds of meddling editors and careless typesetters and obtuse and malevolent reviewers into the lap of the ideal reader.
John Updike
What you lose as you age is witnesses, the ones that watched from early on and cared, like your own little grandstand.
John Updike
What is the past, after all, but a vast sheet of darkness in which a few moments, pricked apparently at random, shine?
John Updike
The creative writer uses his life as well as being its victim he can control, in his work, the self-presentation that in actuality is at the mercy of a thousand accidents.
John Updike
The world keeps ending but new people too dumb to know it keep showing up as if the fun's just started.
John Updike
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.
John Updike
There is the fear that you somehow neglected to say what was really yours to say.
John Updike
Hope bases vast premises on foolish accidents, and reads a word where in fact only a scribble exists.
John Updike
Having children is something we think we ought to do because our parents did it, but when it is over the children are just other members of the human race, rather disappointingly.
John Updike
The difficulty with humorists is that they will mix what they believe with what they don't whichever seems likelier to win an effect.
John Updike
The first breathe of adultery is the freest.
John Updike
You do things and do things and nobody really has a clue.
John Updike
Among the repulsions of atheism for me has been its drastic uninterestingness as an intellectual position.
John Updike
Not judginess, but openness and curiosity are our proper business. I'm still trying to educate myself. I don't think you need to keep rehearsing your instincts. Far better to seek out models of what you can't do.
John Updike
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?
John Updike
Russia is the only country of the world you can be homesick for while you're still in it.
John Updike
Is not the decisive difference between comedy and tragedy that tragedy denies us another chance?
John Updike
Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right or better.
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
Cities aren't like people they live on and on, even though their reason for being where they are has gone downriver and out to sea.
John Updike
