Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
There's always something new by looking at the same thing over and over.
John Updike
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
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
Looking
Writing
Thing
Something
Always
More quotes by John Updike
Within your own generation-the same songs, the same wars, the same attitudes toward those wars, the same rules and radio shows in the air-you can gauge the possibilities and impossibilities. With a person of another generation, you are treading water, playing with fire.
John Updike
Musicians are very mysterious and wonderful people to me I don't know how they do it.
John Updike
I can't bear to finish things, beyond a certain point they get heavy. There's something so dead about a finished painting.
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
The stripped and shapely Maple grieves The ghosts of her Departed leaves. The ground is hard, As hard as stone. The year is old, The birds are flown.
John Updike
Wickedness was like food: once you got started it was hard to stop the gut expanded to take in more and more.
John Updike
What we need is progress with an escape hatch.
John Updike
Women, fire in their crotch, won't burn out, begin by fighting off pricks, end by going wild hunting for one that still works.
John Updike
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
What is the past, after all, but a vast sheet of darkness in which a few moments, pricked apparently at random, shine?
John Updike
The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.
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
Our tears fatten upon our memories of joy.
John Updike
A narrative is like a room on whose walls a number of false doors have been painted while within the narrative, we have many apparent choices of exit, but when the author leads us to one particular door, we know it is the right one because it opens.
John Updike
All men are mortal, and therefore all men are losers our profoundest loyalty goes out to the failed.
John Updike
I would especially like to re-court the Muse of poetry, who ran off with the mailman four years ago, and drops me only a scribbled postcard from time to time.
John Updike
You write because you don't talk very well, and maybe one of the reasons that I was determined to write was that I wasn't an orator, unlike my mother and my grandfather, who both spoke beautifully and spoke all the time. Maybe I grew up with too many voices around me, as a matter of fact.
John Updike
Affairs, ... , like everything else, ask too much.
John Updike
You imagine a reader and try to keep the reader interested. That's storytelling. You also hope to reward the reader with a sense of a completed design, that somebody is in charge, and that while life is pointless, the book isn't pointless. The author knows where he is going. That's form.
John Updike
