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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
Invented
Instrument
Instruments
Mankind
Fiction
Less
Subtlest
Nothing
Examination
Self
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More quotes by John Updike
How sad, how strange, we make companions out of air and hurt them, so they will defy us, completing creation.
John Updike
You do things and do things and nobody really has a clue.
John Updike
What more fiendish proof of cosmic irresponsibility than a Nature which, having invented sex as a way to mix genes, then permits to arise, amid all its perfumed and hypnotic inducements to mate, a tireless tribe of spirochetes and viruses that torture and kill us for following orders?
John Updike
It is easy to love people in memory the hard thing is to love them when they are there in front of you.
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 is always a chance of failure, of producing something totally unnecessary. But I guess that chance of failure is what makes tightrope walking, race-car driving.
John Updike
When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas.
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
To be President of the United States, sir, is to act as advocate for a blind, venomous, and ungrateful client.
John Updike
The fact that we still live well cannot ease the feeling that we no longer live nobly.
John Updike
America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy.
John Updike
A leader is one who, out of madness or goodness, volunteers to take upon himself the woe of the people. There are few men so foolish, hence the erratic quality of leadership in the world.
John Updike
Life is like an overlong drama through which we sit being nagged by the vague memories of having read the reviews.
John Updike
The creative writer uses his life as well as being its victim he can control, in his work, the self-presentation that in actuality is at the mercy of a thousand accidents.
John Updike
There is this quality, in things, of the right way seeming wrong at first.
John Updike
irony is a way of having one's cake while appearing to eat it.
John Updike
Golf camaraderie, like that of astronauts and Antarctic explorers, is based on a common experience of transcendence fat or thin, scratch or duffer, we have been somerwhere together where non-golfers never go.
John Updike
Perfectionism is the enemy of creation, as extreme self- solitude is the enemy of well- being.
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
School is where you go between when your parents can't take you and industry can't take you.
John Updike
