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I must go to Nature disarmed of perspective and stretch myself like a large transparent canvas upon her in the hope that, my submission being perfect, the imprint of a beautiful and useful truth would be taken.

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
Hope
Transparent
Nature
Canvas
Beautiful
Useful
Truth
Large
Must
Perspective
Disarmed
Would
Taken
Imprint
Like
Upon
Submission
Perfect
Stretch

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Many men are more faithful to their golf partners than to their wives and have stuck with them longer.
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Life, just as we first thought, is playing grownup.
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I am sometimes visited by the heretical thought that there is no such thing as good and bad architecture, any more than there is good and bad nature. It is all in where you stand at the time.
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A photograph presents itself not only as a visual representation, but as evidence, more convincing than a painting because of the unimpeachable mechanical means whereby it was made. We do not trust the artist's flattering hand but we do trust film, and shadows, and light.
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Perfectionism is the enemy of creation, as extreme self- solitude is the enemy of well- being.
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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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Life is a razor, you are always in hot water or a scrape.
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Our tears fatten upon our memories of joy.
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How can you respect the world when you see it's being run by a bunch of kids turned old?
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My only duty was to describe reality as it had come to me-to give the mundane its beautiful due.
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Mozart's music gives us permission to live.
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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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Art imitates Nature in this not to dare is to dwindle.
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Movies are, like sharp sunlight, merciless we do not imagine, we view.
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The first breathe of adultery is the freest.
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Government money in the arts, I fear, can only deflect artists from their responsibility to find an authentic market for their products.
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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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Chaos is God's body. Order is the Devil's chains.
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Movies took you right up to the edge but kept you safe.
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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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