Quote

Man is a means for turning things into spirit and turning spirit into things.

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
Means
Spirit
Mean
Things
Men
Turning

More quotes by John Updike

Image
In no other sport must the spectator move.
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
I'm not against TV I don't go on the morning talk shows because I'm not invited. If I was, I might go.
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
Nothing seems to matter quite as much. I no longer think about death in the concentrated way I once did. I don't know? you get so old and you sort of give up in some way. You've had your period of angst, your period of religious desperation, and you've arrived at a philosophical position where you don't need, or you can't bear, to look at it.
John Updike
Image
Living is a compromise, between doing what you want and doing what other people want.
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
We all begin life as parasites within the mother, and writers begin their existence imitatively, within the body of letters.
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
The measure of artistic merit is the length to which a writer is willing to go in following his own compulsions.
John Updike
Image
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
Image
A photograph presents itself not only as a visual representation, but as evidence, more convincing than a painting because of the unimpeachable mechanical means whereby it was made. We do not trust the artist's flattering hand but we do trust film, and shadows, and light.
John Updike
Image
The Founding Fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called an education.
John Updike
Image
Suddenly summoned to witness something great and horrendous, we keep fighting not to reduce it to our own smallness.
John Updike
Image
The difficulty with humorists is that they will mix what they believe with what they don't whichever seems likelier to win an effect.
John Updike
Image
Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right or better.
John Updike
Image
What we need is progress with an escape hatch.
John Updike
Image
Life, just as we first thought, is playing grownup.
John Updike
Image
We are cruel enough without meaning to be.
John Updike