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The stripped and shapely Maple grieves The ghosts of her Departed leaves. The ground is hard, As hard as stone. The year is old, The birds are flown.
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
Years
Ghost
Maple
Leaves
Stripped
Stones
Departed
Ground
Ghosts
Bird
Grieving
Year
Autumn
Shapely
Fall
Birds
Grieves
Hard
Stone
Flown
More quotes by John Updike
Dream golf is simply golf played on another course. We chip from glass tables onto moving stairways we swing in a straightjacket, through masses of cobweb, and awaken not with any sense of unjust hazard but only with a regret that the round can never be completed, and that one of our phantasmal companions has kept the scorecard.
John Updike
Is not the decisive difference between comedy and tragedy that tragedy denies us another chance?
John Updike
Perfectionism is the enemy of creation, as extreme self- solitude is the enemy of well- being.
John Updike
It is in middles that extremes clash, where ambiguity restlessly rules.
John Updike
Journalism has not only its social stimulations but its aesthetic virtues. An invitation into print, from however suspect a source, is an opportunity to make something beautiful, to discover within oneself a treasure that would otherwise have remained buried.
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
Museums and bookstores should feel, I think, like vacant lots - places where the demands on us are our own demands, where the spirit can find exercise in unsupervised play.
John Updike
Living is a compromise, between doing what you want and doing what other people want.
John Updike
My only duty was to describe reality as it had come to me-to give the mundane its beautiful due.
John Updike
In all the green world nothing feels as good as a woman's good nature.
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
Many men are more faithful to their golf partners than to their wives and have stuck with them longer.
John Updike
An American in London...cannot but be impressed and charmed by the city. The momumentality of Washington, the thriving business of New York, the antique intimacy of Boston, plus a certain spacious and open feeling reminiscent of Denver and San Francisco-all these he finds combined for his pleasure.
John Updike
I did feel as though a number of critics had appointed themselves, when they sat down with a new book of mine, to rectify what they felt to be was my inflated reputation and so that the book in hand was not really given a chance but made a kind of weapon in the general attempt to bring me down to size.
John Updike
I was made to feel I could do things. If you get this feeling early and can hold it until you're 15, you tend to never lose it.
John Updike
Each morning my characters greet me with misty faces willing, though chilled, to muster for another day's progress through the dazzling quicksand the marsh of blank paper.
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
Among the repulsions of atheism for me has been its drastic un-interestingness as an intellectual position. Where was the ingenuity, the ambiguity, the humanity of saying that the universe just happened to happen and that when we're dead we're dead?
John Updike
Government [is] an illusion the governed should not encourage.
John Updike
Cities aren't like people they live on and on, even though their reason for being where they are has gone downriver and out to sea.
John Updike
