Quote

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

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
Hand
Flexible
Paperback
Whether
Smaller
Cloth
Hands
Cover
Jacket
Human
Kiss
Seductive
Humans
Kissing
Jackets
Book
Fit
Remote
Average
Fits
Bigger
Texture
Glazed

More quotes by John Updike

Image
The scrape and snap of Keds on loose alley pebbles seems to catapult their voices high into the moist March air blue above the wires.
John Updike
Image
You have a life and there are these volumes on either side that go unvisited some day soon as the world winds he will lie beneath what he now stands on, dead as those insects whose sound he no longer hears, and the grass will go on growing, wild and blind.
John Updike
Image
We take our bearings, daily, from others. To be sane is, to a great extent, to be sociable.
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
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
Fiction is nothing less than the subtlest instrument for self-examination and self-display that Mankind has invented yet.
John Updike
Image
Fraud makes the world go round.
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
Movies are, like sharp sunlight, merciless we do not imagine, we view.
John Updike
Image
Our tears fatten upon our memories of joy.
John Updike
Image
Being able to write becomes a kind of shield, a way of hiding, a way of too instantly transforming pain into honey.
John Updike
Image
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.
John Updike
Image
Hemingway describes literary New York as a bottle full of tapeworms trying to feed on each other.
John Updike
Image
The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.
John Updike
Image
America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy.
John Updike
Image
Adversity in immunological doses has its uses more than that crushes.
John Updike
Image
Our lives fade behind us before we die.
John Updike
Image
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
Image
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
Image
The great thing about the dead, they make space.
John Updike