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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
Reality
Beautiful
Give
Come
Giving
Mundane
Describe
Dues
Duty
More quotes by John Updike
Inspiration arrives as a packet of material to be delivered.
John Updike
Art is like baby shoes. When you coat them with gold, they can no longer be worn.
John Updike
The other sad truth about golf spectatorship is that for today's pros it all comes down to the putting, and that the difference between a putt that drops and one that rims the cup, though teleologically enormous, is intellectually negligeable.
John Updike
In no other sport must the spectator move.
John Updike
Life, too much of it, and not enough. The fear that it will end some day, and the fear that tomorrow will be the same as yesterday.
John Updike
The stripped and shapely Maple grieves The ghosts of her Departed leaves. The ground is hard, As hard as stone. The year is old, The birds are flown.
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
The - writing is a kind of act of aggression, and a person who is not aggressive in his normal, may I say, intercourse with humanity might well be an aggressive writer.
John Updike
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
Mozart's music gives us permission to live.
John Updike
Until the 20th century it was generally assumed that a writer had said what he had to say in his works.
John Updike
To be a human being is to be in a state of tension between your appetites and your dreams, and the social realities around you and your obligations to your fellow man.
John Updike
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
The world keeps ending but new people too dumb to know it keep showing up as if the fun's just started.
John Updike
It is not difficult to deceive the first time, for the deceived possesses no antibodies unvaccinated by suspicion, she overlooks lateness, accepts absurd excuses, permits the flimsiest patching to repair great rents in the quotidian.
John Updike
The difficulty with humorists is that they will mix what they believe with what they don't whichever seems likelier to win an effect.
John Updike
You do things and do things and nobody really has a clue.
John Updike
The Founding Fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called an education.
John Updike
Of nothing but me I sing, lacking another song.
John Updike
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
