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Man is a means for turning things into spirit and turning spirit into things.
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
Turning
Means
Spirit
Mean
Things
Men
More quotes by 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
One does not go to Moscow to get fat.
John Updike
Hemingway describes literary New York as a bottle full of tapeworms trying to feed on each other.
John Updike
Photography is the first art wherein the tool does most of the work.
John Updike
To be President of the United States, sir, is to act as advocate for a blind, venomous, and ungrateful client.
John Updike
Among the repulsions of atheism for me has been its drastic uninterestingness as an intellectual position.
John Updike
The Englishman is under no constitutional obligation to believe that all men are created equal. The American agony is therefore scarcely intelligible, like a saint's self-flagellation viewed by an atheist.
John Updike
What we need is progress with an escape hatch.
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
Of nothing but me I sing, lacking another song.
John Updike
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
Life, just as we first thought, is playing grownup.
John Updike
Basically it's true that my own life has been my chief window for life in America, beginning with my childhood and the conflicts, the struggles, the strains that I felt in my own family.
John Updike
Chaos is God's body. Order is the Devil's chains.
John Updike
We are cruel enough without meaning to be.
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
The scrape and snap of Keds on loose alley pebbles seems to catapult their voices high into the moist March air blue above the wires.
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
Why does one never hear of government funding for the preservation and encouragement of comic strips, girlie magazines and TV soap operas? Because these genres still hold the audience they were created to amuse and instruct.
John Updike
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