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
Great
Summoned
Something
Horrendous
Smallness
Reduce
Witness
Suddenly
Fighting
Keep
More quotes by John Updike
Living is a compromise, between doing what you want and doing what other people want.
John Updike
Being naked approaches being revolutionary going barefoot is mere populism.
John Updike
Writing doesn't require drive. It's like saying a chicken has to have drive to lay an egg.
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
Golf appeals to the idiot in us and the child. Just how childlike golf players become is proven by their frequent inability to count past five.
John Updike
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
I love my government not least for the extent to which it leaves me alone.
John Updike
If you look at the best-seller list, it is mostly thrillers. Very few books attempt to create an image of the life we live. I knew there were writers who wore tweed coats and lived in Connecticut and somehow made a living, and that's what I aimed to do. I've tried to write as well as I can with books that say something to any reader.
John Updike
I would especially like to re-court the Muse of poetry, who ran off with the mailman four years ago, and drops me only a scribbled postcard from time to time.
John Updike
I am sometimes visited by the heretical thought that there is no such thing as good and bad architecture, any more than there is good and bad nature. It is all in where you stand at the time.
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
By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.
John Updike
What we need is progress with an escape hatch.
John Updike
In no other sport must the spectator move.
John Updike
The first breathe of adultery is the freest.
John Updike
Prose should have a flow, the forward momentum of a certain energized weight it should feel like a voice tumbling in your ear.
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
Mozart's music gives us permission to live.
John Updike
Our tears fatten upon our memories of joy.
John Updike
We take our bearings, daily, from others. To be sane is, to a great extent, to be sociable.
John Updike
