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What is the past, after all, but a vast sheet of darkness in which a few moments, pricked apparently at random, shine?

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
Apparently
Shine
Vast
Shining
Darkness
Pricked
Moments
Sheet
Past
Random
Sheets

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The great thing about the dead, they make space.
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A narrative is like a room on whose walls a number of false doors have been painted while within the narrative, we have many apparent choices of exit, but when the author leads us to one particular door, we know it is the right one because it opens.
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In general, the churches, visited by me often on weekdays... bore for me the same relation to God that billboards did to Coca-Cola they promoted thirst without quenching it.
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As I get older, my childhood self becomes more accessible to me, but selectively, in images as stylized and suspect as moments remembered from a novel read years ago.
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The difference between a childhood and a boyhood must be this: our childhood is what we alone have had our boyhood is what any boy in our environment would have had.
John Updike
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The Founding Fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called an education.
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The measure of artistic merit is the length to which a writer is willing to go in following his own compulsions.
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Russia is the only country of the world you can be homesick for while you're still in it.
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I love my government not least for the extent to which it leaves me alone.
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A photograph presents itself not only as a visual representation, but as evidence, more convincing than a painting because of the unimpeachable mechanical means whereby it was made. We do not trust the artist's flattering hand but we do trust film, and shadows, and light.
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Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right or better.
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Of nothing but me I sing, lacking another song.
John Updike
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We are each of us like our little blue planet, hung in black space, upheld by nothing but our mutual reassurances, our loving lies.
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From infancy on, we are all spies the shame is not this but that the secrets to be discovered are so paltry and few.
John Updike
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Government [is] an illusion the governed should not encourage.
John Updike
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Government is either organized benevolence or organized madness its peculiar magnitude permits no shading.
John Updike
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Life is like an overlong drama through which we sit being nagged by the vague memories of having read the reviews.
John Updike
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The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.
John Updike
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Life is a nacho. It can be yummy-crunchy or squishy-yucky. It just depends on how long it takes for you to start eating it.
John Updike
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Our tears fatten upon our memories of joy.
John Updike