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Hoping to fashion a mirror, the lover doth polish the face of his beloved until he produces a skull.
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
Hoping
Fashion
Face
Produces
Faces
Lover
Love
Beloved
Skull
Mirror
Skulls
Mirrors
Doth
Lovers
Polish
Produce
More quotes by John Updike
Fraud makes the world go round.
John Updike
If you're telling me I'm not mature, that's one thing I don't cry over since as far as I can make out it's the same thing as being dead.
John Updike
What you lose as you age is witnesses, the ones that watched from early on and cared, like your own little grandstand.
John Updike
Among the repulsions of atheism for me has been its drastic uninterestingness as an intellectual position.
John Updike
Smaller than a breadbox, bigger than a TV remote, the average book fits into the human hand with a seductive nestling, a kiss of texture, whether of cover cloth, glazed jacket, or flexible paperback.
John Updike
How sad, how strange, we make companions out of air and hurt them, so they will defy us, completing creation.
John Updike
The New England spirit does not seek solutions in a crowd raw light and solitariness are less dreaded than welcomed as enhancers of our essential selves.
John Updike
To be President of the United States, sir, is to act as advocate for a blind, venomous, and ungrateful client.
John Updike
All love is betrayal, in that it flatters life. The loveless man is best armed.
John Updike
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
It is not enough for a story to flow. It has to kind of trickle and glint as it crosses over the stones of the bare facts.
John Updike
Life is a razor, you are always in hot water or a scrape.
John Updike
Seemed to me important in writing about people to be able to describe the sexual transactions between them. It's - for many people it's the height of, what they see, of ecstasy and poetry is in their sexual encounters. And furthermore, personality - human personality does not end in the bedroom, but persists.
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
The essence of government is concern for the widest possible public interest the essence of the humanities, it seems to me, is private study, thought, and passion. Publicity is a essential to the one as privacy is to the other.
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
irony is a way of having one's cake while appearing to eat it.
John Updike
Golf appeals to the idiot in us and the child. Just how childlike golf players become is proven by their frequent inability to count past five.
John Updike
Life is a nacho. It can be yummy-crunchy or squishy-yucky. It just depends on how long it takes for you to start eating it.
John Updike
Our tears fatten upon our memories of joy.
John Updike
