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Fiction is nothing less than the subtlest instrument for self-examination and self-display that Mankind has invented yet.
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
Nothing
Examination
Self
Display
Invented
Instrument
Instruments
Mankind
Fiction
Less
Subtlest
More quotes by John Updike
Russia is the only country of the world you can be homesick for while you're still in it.
John Updike
History. The more of it you have the more you have to live it. After a little while there gets to be too much of it to memorize and maybe that's when empires start to decline.
John Updike
There's always something new by looking at the same thing over and over.
John Updike
President George] Bush talked to us like we were a bunch of morons and we ate it up. Can you imagine, the Pledge of Allegiance, read my lips-can you imagine such crap in this day and age?
John Updike
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
How can the planet keep turning and turning and not get so bored it explodes?
John Updike
But it seems to me that once you begin a gesture it's fatal not to go through with it.
John Updike
Many men are more faithful to their golf partners than to their wives and have stuck with them longer.
John Updike
Mozart's music gives us permission to live.
John Updike
Movies took you right up to the edge but kept you safe.
John Updike
Photography is the first art wherein the tool does most of the work.
John Updike
The - writing is a kind of act of aggression, and a person who is not aggressive in his normal, may I say, intercourse with humanity might well be an aggressive writer.
John Updike
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
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
As I get older, my childhood self becomes more accessible to me, but selectively, in images as stylized and suspect as moments remembered from a novel read years ago.
John Updike
To be human is to be in the tense condition of a death-foreseeing, consciously libidinous animal. No other earthly creature suffers such a capacity for thought, such a complexity of envisioned but frustrated possibilities, such a troubling ability to question the tribal and biological imperatives.
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
In all the green world nothing feels as good as a woman's good nature.
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
Affairs, ... , like everything else, ask too much.
John Updike
