Quote

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

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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
Kind
Literary
Clamber
Instinct
Newcomer
Fingers
Medusa
Step
Aboard
Scene
Newcomers
Steps
Raft
Small
Sinking
Trying
Tries

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Let us not seek to make it less monstrous, for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty, lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are embarrassed by the miracle, and crushed by remonstrance.
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Art is like baby shoes. When you coat them with gold, they can no longer be worn.
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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.
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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.
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To be President of the United States, sir, is to act as advocate for a blind, venomous, and ungrateful client.
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Hemingway describes literary New York as a bottle full of tapeworms trying to feed on each other.
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Customs and convictions change respectable people are the last to know, or to admit, the change, and the ones most offended by fresh reflections of the facts in the mirror of art.
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Life is a razor, you are always in hot water or a scrape.
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What we need is progress with an escape hatch.
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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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A writer's self-consciousness, for which he is much scorned, is really a mode of interestedness, that inevitably turns outward.
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Hope bases vast premises on foolish accidents, and reads a word where in fact only a scribble exists.
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There is the fear that you somehow neglected to say what was really yours to say.
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Students present themselves...like a succession of CDs whose shimmering surface gives no clue to their contents without the equipment to play them.
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Mozart's music gives us permission to live.
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Our tears fatten upon our memories of joy.
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Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that's the stuff life is made of. Suspect each moment, for it is a thief, tiptoeing away with more than it brings.
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Families, doing everything for each other out of imagined obligation and always getting in each other's way, what a tangle.
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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.
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From infancy on, we are all spies the shame is not this but that the secrets to be discovered are so paltry and few.
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