Quote

Hemingway describes literary New York as a bottle full of tapeworms trying to feed on each other.

John Updike

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

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
York
Full
Trying
Hemingway
Describes
Bottle
Bottles
Literary
Feed

More quotes by John Updike

Image
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.
John Updike
Image
President George] Bush talked to us like we were a bunch of morons and we ate it up. Can you imagine, the Pledge of Allegiance, read my lips-can you imagine such crap in this day and age?
John Updike
Image
The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.
John Updike
Image
Movies are, like sharp sunlight, merciless we do not imagine, we view.
John Updike
Image
What we need is progress with an escape hatch.
John Updike
Image
Yes, there is a ton of information on the web, but much of it is egregiously inaccurate, unedited, unattributed and juvenile.
John Updike
Image
I love my government not least for the extent to which it leaves me alone.
John Updike
Image
My only duty was to describe reality as it had come to me-to give the mundane its beautiful due.
John Updike
Image
There was clearly great charm and worth in a sport so quaintly perverse in its basic instructions. Hit down to make the ball rise. Swing easy to make it go far. Finish high to make it go straight.
John Updike
Image
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
Image
Writing doesn't require drive. It's like saying a chicken has to have drive to lay an egg.
John Updike
Image
Life is a roller coaster, you have your ups and downs unless you fall off.
John Updike
Image
We are fated to love one another we hardly exist outside our love, we are just animals without it, with a birth and a death and constant fear between. Our love has lifted us up , out of the dreadfulness of merely living.
John Updike
Image
What seems to sell books is good word-of-mouth, not promotion tours. I'm too old to believe that media promotion of a book really matters. What matters is how it will look 100 years from now, not how many copies are sold.
John Updike
Image
Is not the decisive difference between comedy and tragedy that tragedy denies us another chance?
John Updike
Image
Until the 20th century it was generally assumed that a writer had said what he had to say in his works.
John Updike
Image
Professionalism in art has this difficulty: To be professional is to be dependable, to be dependable is to be predictable, and predictability is esthetically boring - an anti-virtue in a field where we hope to be astonished and startled and at some deep level refreshed.
John Updike
Image
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.
John Updike
Image
The moment when the finished book or, better yet, a tightly packed carton of finished books arrives on my doorstep is the moment of truth, of culmination its bliss lasts as much as five minutes, until the first typographical error or production flaw is noticed.
John Updike
Image
How can you respect the world when you see it's being run by a bunch of kids turned old?
John Updike