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
Hope bases vast premises on foolish accidents, and reads a word where in fact only a scribble exists.
John Updike
Image
American art in general... takes to surreal exaggerations and metaphors but its Puritan work ethic has little use for the playful self-indulgence behind Parisian Surrealism.
John Updike
Image
The literary scene is a kind of Medusa’s raft, small and sinking, and one’s instinct when a newcomer tries to clamber aboard is to step on his fingers.
John Updike
Image
How can you respect the world when you see it's being run by a bunch of kids turned old?
John Updike
Image
Life is a razor, you are always in hot water or a scrape.
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
Life, just as we first thought, is playing grownup.
John Updike
Image
Fiction is in danger of becoming a kind of poetry. Only other poets read it. Only other fiction writers care about it.
John Updike
Image
Museums and bookstores should feel, I think, like vacant lots - places where the demands on us are our own demands, where the spirit can find exercise in unsupervised play.
John Updike
Image
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
Image
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
Image
There's always something new by looking at the same thing over and over.
John Updike
Image
The Florida sun seems not much a single thing overhead but a set of klieg lights that pursue you everywhere with an even white illumination.
John Updike
Image
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
Image
Four years was enough of Harvard. I still had a lot to learn, but had been given the liberating notion that now I could teach myself.
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
Government money in the arts, I fear, can only deflect artists from their responsibility to find an authentic market for their products.
John Updike
Image
Being able to write becomes a kind of shield, a way of hiding, a way of too instantly transforming pain into honey.
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
Students present themselves...like a succession of CDs whose shimmering surface gives no clue to their contents without the equipment to play them.
John Updike