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Everybody who tells you how to act has whiskey on their breath.

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
Tells
Breath
Breaths
Everybody
Whiskey

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All men are mortal, and therefore all men are losers our profoundest loyalty goes out to the failed.
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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.
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Revolution is just one crowd taking power from another.
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The breezes taste Of apple peel. The air is full Of smells to feel- Ripe fruit, old footballs, Burning brush, New books, erasers, Chalk, and such. The bee, his hive, Well-honeyed hum, And Mother cuts Chrysanthemums. Like plates washed clean With suds, the days Are polished with A morning haze.
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How sad, how strange, we make companions out of air and hurt them, so they will defy us, completing creation.
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Life, just as we first thought, is playing grownup.
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Fiction is in danger of becoming a kind of poetry. Only other poets read it. Only other fiction writers care about it.
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The heart prefers to move against the grain of circumstance perversity is the souls very life.
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Government is either organized benevolence or organized madness its peculiar magnitude permits no shading.
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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.
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You have a life and there are these volumes on either side that go unvisited some day soon as the world winds he will lie beneath what he now stands on, dead as those insects whose sound he no longer hears, and the grass will go on growing, wild and blind.
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How can the planet keep turning and turning and not get so bored it explodes?
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In no other sport must the spectator move.
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The Florida sun seems not much a single thing overhead but a set of klieg lights that pursue you everywhere with an even white illumination.
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The other sad truth about golf spectatorship is that for today's pros it all comes down to the putting, and that the difference between a putt that drops and one that rims the cup, though teleologically enormous, is intellectually negligeable.
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We all begin life as parasites within the mother, and writers begin their existence imitatively, within the body of letters.
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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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The muttered hint, Remember, you have a stroke here, freezes my joints like a blast from Siberia.
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There is no such thing as static happiness. Happiness is a mixed thing, a thing compounded of sacrifices, and losses, and betrayals.
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Life is a video game. No matter how good you get, you are always zapped in the end.
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