Quote

The great thing about the dead, they make space.

John Updike

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

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
Make
Dead
Space
Death
Great
Thing

More quotes by John Updike

Image
If you're telling me I'm not mature, that's one thing I don't cry over since as far as I can make out it's the same thing as being dead.
John Updike
Image
Fraud makes the world go round.
John Updike
Image
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
Image
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.
John Updike
Image
I can't bear to finish things, beyond a certain point they get heavy. There's something so dead about a finished painting.
John Updike
Image
But it seems to me that once you begin a gesture it's fatal not to go through with it.
John Updike
Image
The moment when the finished book or, better yet, a tightly packed carton of finished books arrives on my doorstep is the moment of truth, of culmination its bliss lasts as much as five minutes, until the first typographical error or production flaw is noticed.
John Updike
Image
Do what the heart commands. The heart is our only guide.
John Updike
Image
One of the nice things about having a lover, it makes you think about everything anew. The rest of your life becomes a kind of movie, flat and even rather funny.
John Updike
Image
What more fiendish proof of cosmic irresponsibility than a Nature which, having invented sex as a way to mix genes, then permits to arise, amid all its perfumed and hypnotic inducements to mate, a tireless tribe of spirochetes and viruses that torture and kill us for following orders?
John Updike
Image
Chaos is God's body. Order is the Devil's chains.
John Updike
Image
Looking foolish does the spirit good. The need not to look foolish is one of youth's many burdens as we get older we are exempted from more and more.
John Updike
Image
New York is of course many cities, and an exile does not return to the one he left.
John Updike
Image
Fiction is in danger of becoming a kind of poetry. Only other poets read it. Only other fiction writers care about it.
John Updike
Image
The fact that we still live well cannot ease the feeling that we no longer live nobly.
John Updike
Image
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.
John Updike
Image
You can never get the smell of smoke out. Like the smell of failure in life.
John Updike
Image
For male and female alike, the bodies of the other sex are messages signaling what we must do - they are glowing signifiers of our own necessities.
John Updike
Image
Is not the decisive difference between comedy and tragedy that tragedy denies us another chance?
John Updike
Image
Art is like baby shoes. When you coat them with gold, they can no longer be worn.
John Updike