Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
Being able to write becomes a kind of shield, a way of hiding, a way of too instantly transforming pain into honey.
John Updike
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
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
Kind
Transforming
Way
Hiding
Honey
Becomes
Pain
Write
Shield
Able
Shields
Writing
Instantly
More quotes by John Updike
The great thing about the dead, they make space.
John Updike
My only duty was to describe reality as it had come to me-to give the mundane its beautiful due.
John Updike
Many men are more faithful to their golf partners than to their wives and have stuck with them longer.
John Updike
Of nothing but me I sing, lacking another song.
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
Until the 20th century it was generally assumed that a writer had said what he had to say in his works.
John Updike
We're past the age of heroes and hero kings. ... Most of our lives are basically mundane and dull, and it's up to the writer to find ways to make them interesting.
John Updike
What we need is progress with an escape hatch.
John Updike
Inspiration arrives as a packet of material to be delivered.
John Updike
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
Art is like baby shoes. When you coat them with gold, they can no longer be worn.
John Updike
Life is a razor, you are always in hot water or a scrape.
John Updike
Living is a compromise, between doing what you want and doing what other people want.
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
Everybody who tells you how to act has whiskey on their breath.
John Updike
All men are mortal, and therefore all men are losers our profoundest loyalty goes out to the failed.
John Updike
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.
John Updike
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.
John Updike
There is the fear that you somehow neglected to say what was really yours to say.
John Updike
It is in middles that extremes clash, where ambiguity restlessly rules.
John Updike
