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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
Mirror
Skull
Mirrors
Skulls
Lovers
Doth
Produce
Polish
Fashion
Hoping
Face
Produces
Faces
Lover
Love
Beloved

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The refusal to rest content, the willingness to risk excess on behalf of one's obsessions, is what distinguishes artists from entertainers, and what makes some artists adventurers on behalf of us all.
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The throat: how strange, that there is not more erotic emphasis upon it. For here, through this compound pulsing pillar, our life makes its leap into spirit, and in the other direction gulps down what it needs of the material world.
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It's not up to us what we learn, but merely whether we learn through joy or through pain.
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Fiction is in danger of becoming a kind of poetry. Only other poets read it. Only other fiction writers care about it.
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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.
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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.
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Having children is something we think we ought to do because our parents did it, but when it is over the children are just other members of the human race, rather disappointingly.
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In a country this large and a language even larger ... there ought to be a living for somebody who cares and wants to entertain and instruct a reader.
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How sad, how strange, we make companions out of air and hurt them, so they will defy us, completing creation.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.
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Now that I am sixty, I see why the idea of elder wisdom has passed from currency.
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The guarantee that our self enjoys an intended relation to the outer world is most, if not all, we ask from religion. God is the self projected onto reality by our natural and necessary optimism. He is the not-me personified.
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But it is just two lovers, holding hands and in a hurry to reach their car, their locked hands a starfish leaping through the dark.
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Adversity in immunological doses has its uses more than that crushes.
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What is the past, after all, but a vast sheet of darkness in which a few moments, pricked apparently at random, shine?
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