Quote

The guarantee that our self enjoys an intended relation to the outer world is most, if not all, we ask from religion. God is the self projected onto reality by our natural and necessary optimism. He is the not-me personified.

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
Natural
Onto
Reality
Optimism
Personified
Self
Relation
Projected
World
Atheism
Enjoys
Necessary
Outer
Asks
Guarantee
Religion
Intended
Enjoy
Guarantees

More quotes by John Updike

Image
Yes, there is a ton of information on the web, but much of it is egregiously inaccurate, unedited, unattributed and juvenile.
John Updike
Image
Life is like an overlong drama through which we sit being nagged by the vague memories of having read the reviews.
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
School is where you go between when your parents can't take you and industry can't take you.
John Updike
Image
Writing doesn't require drive. It's like saying a chicken has to have drive to lay an egg.
John Updike
Image
I love my government not least for the extent to which it leaves me alone.
John Updike
Image
Among the repulsions of atheism for me has been its drastic uninterestingness as an intellectual position.
John Updike
Image
Is not the decisive difference between comedy and tragedy that tragedy denies us another chance?
John Updike
Image
Fraud makes the world go round.
John Updike
Image
Man makes one journey all his living days, Down through the realms of music and of art Down through the halls of fame and glorious praise Down through the tears and triumphs of the heart To some sweet woman waiting some place there. For her he builds his cities and makes war, Seeks gold and glorious wealth to store.
John Updike
Image
What is the past, after all, but a vast sheet of darkness in which a few moments, pricked apparently at random, shine?
John Updike
Image
A cynic is a kind of romantic who has aged.
John Updike
Image
Many men are more faithful to their golf partners than to their wives and have stuck with them longer.
John Updike
Image
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
Image
There is no doubt that I have lots of words inside me but at moments, like rush-hour traffic at the mouth of a tunnel, they jam.
John Updike
Image
Fiction is nothing less than the subtlest instrument for self-examination and self-display that Mankind has invented yet.
John Updike
Image
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
Image
Customs and convictions change respectable people are the last to know, or to admit, the change, and the ones most offended by fresh reflections of the facts in the mirror of art.
John Updike
Image
When we try in good faith to believe in materialism, in the exclusive reality of the physical, we are asking our selves to step aside we are disavowing the very realm where we exist and where all things precious are kept - the realm of emotion and conscience, of memory and intention and sensation.
John Updike
Image
Revolution is just one crowd taking power from another.
John Updike