Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
The measure of artistic merit is the length to which a writer is willing to go in following his own compulsions.
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
Writer
Willing
Compulsions
Writing
Compulsion
Length
Merit
Artistic
Measure
Following
More quotes by John Updike
Nothing feels worse than other people's good times.
John Updike
Mozart's music gives us permission to live.
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
Baseball is meant to be fun, and not all the solemn money-men in fur-collared greatcoats, not all the scruffy media cameramen and sour-faced reporters that crowd around the dugouts can quite smother the exhilarating spaciousness and grace of this impudently relaxed sport, a game of innumerable potential redemptions and curious disappointments.
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
There is the fear that you somehow neglected to say what was really yours to say.
John Updike
The first breath of adultery is the freest after it, constraints aping marriage develop.
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
Hemingway describes literary New York as a bottle full of tapeworms trying to feed on each other.
John Updike
Photography is the first art wherein the tool does most of the work.
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
Writing doesn't require drive. It's like saying a chicken has to have drive to lay an egg.
John Updike
The great thing about the dead, they make space.
John Updike
Now that I am sixty, I see why the idea of elder wisdom has passed from currency.
John Updike
The yearning for an afterlife is the opposite of selfish: it is love and praise for the world that we are privileged, in this complex interval of light, to witness and experience.
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
Art is like baby shoes. When you coat them with gold, they can no longer be worn.
John Updike
The essence of government is concern for the widest possible public interest the essence of the humanities, it seems to me, is private study, thought, and passion. Publicity is a essential to the one as privacy is to the other.
John Updike
If she’d been born at the right time they would have burned her over in Salem.
John Updike
Life is a video game. No matter how good you get, you are always zapped in the end.
John Updike
