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
Bottle
Bottles
Literary
Feed
York
Full
Trying
Hemingway
Describes

More quotes by John Updike

Image
The difficulty is, all swing thoughts decay, like radium. What burnt up the course on Wednesday has turned to lead on Sunday. Yet it does not do to have a blank mind: the terrible hugeness of the course will rush into the vacuum and the ball will spray like a thing berserk.
John Updike
Image
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.
John Updike
Image
Days, pale slices between nights, they blend, not exactly alike, transparencies so lightly tinted that only stacked all together do they darken to a fatal shade.
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
New York is of course many cities, and an exile does not return to the one he left.
John Updike
Image
History. The more of it you have the more you have to live it. After a little while there gets to be too much of it to memorize and maybe that's when empires start to decline.
John Updike
Image
Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right or better.
John Updike
Image
I'm not against TV I don't go on the morning talk shows because I'm not invited. If I was, I might go.
John Updike
Image
School is where you go between when your parents can't take you and industry can't take you.
John Updike
Image
Government is either organized benevolence or organized madness its peculiar magnitude permits no shading.
John Updike
Image
I love my government not least for the extent to which it leaves me alone.
John Updike
Image
Life is a nacho. It can be yummy-crunchy or squishy-yucky. It just depends on how long it takes for you to start eating it.
John Updike
Image
Hoping to fashion a mirror, the lover doth polish the face of his beloved until he produces a skull.
John Updike
Image
Among the repulsions of atheism for me has been its drastic un-interestingness as an intellectual position. Where was the ingenuity, the ambiguity, the humanity of saying that the universe just happened to happen and that when we're dead we're dead?
John Updike
Image
There is no such thing as static happiness. Happiness is a mixed thing, a thing compounded of sacrifices, and losses, and betrayals.
John Updike
Image
Fiction is nothing less than the subtlest instrument for self-examination and self-display that Mankind has invented yet.
John Updike
Image
I'm willing to show good taste, if I can, in somebody else's living room, but our reading life is too short for a writer to be in any way polite. Since his words enter into another's brain in silence and intimacy, he should be as honest and explicit as we are with ourselves.
John Updike
Image
Men emerge pale from the little printing plant at four sharp, ghosts for an instant, blinking, until the outdoor light overcomes the look of constant indoor light clinging to them.
John Updike
Image
The fact that we still live well cannot ease the feeling that we no longer live nobly.
John Updike
Image
We take our bearings, daily, from others. To be sane is, to a great extent, to be sociable.
John Updike