Quote

Fiction is nothing less than the subtlest instrument for self-examination and self-display that Mankind has invented yet.

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
Instruments
Mankind
Fiction
Less
Subtlest
Nothing
Examination
Self
Display
Invented
Instrument

More quotes by John Updike

Image
Government is either organized benevolence or organized madness its peculiar magnitude permits no shading.
John Updike
Image
To be President of the United States, sir, is to act as advocate for a blind, venomous, and ungrateful client.
John Updike
Image
Chaos is God's body. Order is the Devil's chains.
John Updike
Image
Art is like baby shoes. When you coat them with gold, they can no longer be worn.
John Updike
Image
Man is a means for turning things into spirit and turning spirit into things.
John Updike
Image
Musicians are very mysterious and wonderful people to me I don't know how they do it.
John Updike
Image
The difficulty is, all swing thoughts decay, like radium. What burnt up the course on Wednesday has turned to lead on Sunday. Yet it does not do to have a blank mind: the terrible hugeness of the course will rush into the vacuum and the ball will spray like a thing berserk.
John Updike
Image
How sad, how strange, we make companions out of air and hurt them, so they will defy us, completing creation.
John Updike
Image
The first breath of adultery is the freest after it, constraints aping marriage develop.
John Updike
Image
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
Image
Fraud makes the world go round.
John Updike
Image
There is no such thing as static happiness. Happiness is a mixed thing, a thing compounded of sacrifices, and losses, and betrayals.
John Updike
Image
Human was the music, natural was the static.
John Updike
Image
The fact that we still live well cannot ease the feeling that we no longer live nobly.
John Updike
Image
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
Image
Living is a compromise, between doing what you want and doing what other people want.
John Updike
Image
Children are not a zoo of entertainingly exotic creatures, but an array of mirrors in which the human predicament leaps out at us.
John Updike
Image
Hope bases vast premises on foolish accidents, and reads a word where in fact only a scribble exists.
John Updike
Image
From infancy on, we are all spies the shame is not this but that the secrets to be discovered are so paltry and few.
John Updike
Image
Is not the decisive difference between comedy and tragedy that tragedy denies us another chance?
John Updike