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Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that's the stuff life is made of. Suspect each moment, for it is a thief, tiptoeing away with more than it brings.
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
Away
Thief
Moments
Suspect
Made
Thieves
Time
Suspects
Love
Brings
Life
Thou
Tiptoeing
Moment
Squander
Stuff
Dost
More quotes by 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
Nothing feels worse than other people's good times.
John Updike
Life, just as we first thought, is playing grownup.
John Updike
Four years was enough of Harvard. I still had a lot to learn, but had been given the liberating notion that now I could teach myself.
John Updike
New York is of course many cities, and an exile does not return to the one he left.
John Updike
Is not the decisive difference between comedy and tragedy that tragedy denies us another chance?
John Updike
The Englishman is under no constitutional obligation to believe that all men are created equal. The American agony is therefore scarcely intelligible, like a saint's self-flagellation viewed by an atheist.
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
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
Of nothing but me I sing, lacking another song.
John Updike
Government [is] an illusion the governed should not encourage.
John Updike
How can you respect the world when you see it's being run by a bunch of kids turned old?
John Updike
The throat: how strange, that there is not more erotic emphasis upon it. For here, through this compound pulsing pillar, our life makes its leap into spirit, and in the other direction gulps down what it needs of the material world.
John Updike
Life is a razor, you are always in hot water or a scrape.
John Updike
History. The more of it you have the more you have to live it. After a little while there gets to be too much of it to memorize and maybe that's when empires start to decline.
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
Fiction is in danger of becoming a kind of poetry. Only other poets read it. Only other fiction writers care about it.
John Updike
Having children is something we think we ought to do because our parents did it, but when it is over the children are just other members of the human race, rather disappointingly.
John Updike
Art imitates Nature in this not to dare is to dwindle.
John Updike
Why does one never hear of government funding for the preservation and encouragement of comic strips, girlie magazines and TV soap operas? Because these genres still hold the audience they were created to amuse and instruct.
John Updike
