Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
Suddenly summoned to witness something great and horrendous, we keep fighting not to reduce it to our own smallness.
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
Smallness
Reduce
Witness
Suddenly
Fighting
Keep
Great
Summoned
Something
Horrendous
More quotes by John Updike
You imagine a reader and try to keep the reader interested. That's storytelling. You also hope to reward the reader with a sense of a completed design, that somebody is in charge, and that while life is pointless, the book isn't pointless. The author knows where he is going. That's form.
John Updike
In all the green world nothing feels as good as a woman's good nature.
John Updike
Being able to write becomes a kind of shield, a way of hiding, a way of too instantly transforming pain into honey.
John Updike
Seemed to me important in writing about people to be able to describe the sexual transactions between them. It's - for many people it's the height of, what they see, of ecstasy and poetry is in their sexual encounters. And furthermore, personality - human personality does not end in the bedroom, but persists.
John Updike
You write because you don't talk very well, and maybe one of the reasons that I was determined to write was that I wasn't an orator, unlike my mother and my grandfather, who both spoke beautifully and spoke all the time. Maybe I grew up with too many voices around me, as a matter of fact.
John Updike
All men are mortal, and therefore all men are losers our profoundest loyalty goes out to the failed.
John Updike
How can the planet keep turning and turning and not get so bored it explodes?
John Updike
The first breathe of adultery is the freest.
John Updike
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.
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
Adversity in immunological doses has its uses more than that crushes.
John Updike
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
Hemingway describes literary New York as a bottle full of tapeworms trying to feed on each other.
John Updike
irony is a way of having one's cake while appearing to eat it.
John Updike
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.
John Updike
Within your own generation-the same songs, the same wars, the same attitudes toward those wars, the same rules and radio shows in the air-you can gauge the possibilities and impossibilities. With a person of another generation, you are treading water, playing with fire.
John Updike
There is this quality, in things, of the right way seeming wrong at first.
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
Basically it's true that my own life has been my chief window for life in America, beginning with my childhood and the conflicts, the struggles, the strains that I felt in my own family.
John Updike
I'm somewhat shy about the brutal facts of being a carnivore. I don't like meat to look like animals. I prefer it in the form of sausages, hamburger and meat loaf, far removed from the living thing.
John Updike
