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My only duty was to describe reality as it had come to me-to give the mundane its beautiful due.
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
Give
Come
Giving
Mundane
Describe
Dues
Duty
Reality
Beautiful
More quotes by John Updike
Man makes one journey all his living days, Down through the realms of music and of art Down through the halls of fame and glorious praise Down through the tears and triumphs of the heart To some sweet woman waiting some place there. For her he builds his cities and makes war, Seeks gold and glorious wealth to store.
John Updike
Being naked approaches being revolutionary going barefoot is mere populism.
John Updike
The New England spirit does not seek solutions in a crowd raw light and solitariness are less dreaded than welcomed as enhancers of our essential selves.
John Updike
Of nothing but me I sing, lacking another song.
John Updike
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.
John Updike
Life is like an overlong drama through which we sit being nagged by the vague memories of having read the reviews.
John Updike
Revolution is just one crowd taking power from another.
John Updike
American art in general... takes to surreal exaggerations and metaphors but its Puritan work ethic has little use for the playful self-indulgence behind Parisian Surrealism.
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
Nothing seems to matter quite as much. I no longer think about death in the concentrated way I once did. I don't know? you get so old and you sort of give up in some way. You've had your period of angst, your period of religious desperation, and you've arrived at a philosophical position where you don't need, or you can't bear, to look at it.
John Updike
I never made a decision in my life that wasn't one hundred per cent selfish.
John Updike
Smaller than a breadbox, bigger than a TV remote, the average book fits into the human hand with a seductive nestling, a kiss of texture, whether of cover cloth, glazed jacket, or flexible paperback.
John Updike
There is no doubt that I have lots of words inside me but at moments, like rush-hour traffic at the mouth of a tunnel, they jam.
John Updike
Appealingness is inversely proportional to attainability.
John Updike
In no other sport must the spectator move.
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
Hope bases vast premises on foolish accidents, and reads a word where in fact only a scribble exists.
John Updike
I did feel as though a number of critics had appointed themselves, when they sat down with a new book of mine, to rectify what they felt to be was my inflated reputation and so that the book in hand was not really given a chance but made a kind of weapon in the general attempt to bring me down to size.
John Updike
Government [is] an illusion the governed should not encourage.
John Updike
All those little congruences and arabesques you prepared with such delicate anticipatory pleasure are gobbled up as if by pigs at a pastry cart.
John Updike
