Quote

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

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
Needs
Youth
Good
Looking
Spirit
Doe
Exempted
Look
Burdens
Looks
Foolish
Need
Burden
Many
Older

More quotes by John Updike

Image
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.
John Updike
Image
All those little congruences and arabesques you prepared with such delicate anticipatory pleasure are gobbled up as if by pigs at a pastry cart.
John Updike
Image
There is the fear that you somehow neglected to say what was really yours to say.
John Updike
Image
An American in London...cannot but be impressed and charmed by the city. The momumentality of Washington, the thriving business of New York, the antique intimacy of Boston, plus a certain spacious and open feeling reminiscent of Denver and San Francisco-all these he finds combined for his pleasure.
John Updike
Image
The muttered hint, Remember, you have a stroke here, freezes my joints like a blast from Siberia.
John Updike
Image
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.
John Updike
Image
You do things and do things and nobody really has a clue.
John Updike
Image
Our tears fatten upon our memories of joy.
John Updike
Image
Chaos is God's body. Order is the Devil's chains.
John Updike
Image
There is no such thing as static happiness. Happiness is a mixed thing, a thing compounded of sacrifices, and losses, and betrayals.
John Updike
Image
Days, pale slices between nights, they blend, not exactly alike, transparencies so lightly tinted that only stacked all together do they darken to a fatal shade.
John Updike
Image
I'm not against TV I don't go on the morning talk shows because I'm not invited. If I was, I might go.
John Updike
Image
Life is a video game. No matter how good you get, you are always zapped in the end.
John Updike
Image
To be a human being is to be in a state of tension between your appetites and your dreams, and the social realities around you and your obligations to your fellow man.
John Updike
Image
Mozart's music gives us permission to live.
John Updike
Image
I'm willing to show good taste, if I can, in somebody else's living room, but our reading life is too short for a writer to be in any way polite. Since his words enter into another's brain in silence and intimacy, he should be as honest and explicit as we are with ourselves.
John Updike
Image
Our lives fade behind us before we die.
John Updike
Image
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
Image
Inspiration arrives as a packet of material to be delivered.
John Updike
Image
In all the green world nothing feels as good as a woman's good nature.
John Updike