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

More quotes by John Updike

Image
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
Image
What we need is progress with an escape hatch.
John Updike
Image
Now that I am sixty, I see why the idea of elder wisdom has passed from currency.
John Updike
Image
To be President of the United States, sir, is to act as advocate for a blind, venomous, and ungrateful client.
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
I can't bear to finish things, beyond a certain point they get heavy. There's something so dead about a finished painting.
John Updike
Image
Art is like baby shoes. When you coat them with gold, they can no longer be worn.
John Updike
Image
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
Image
Fiction is nothing less than the subtlest instrument for self-examination and self-display that Mankind has invented yet.
John Updike
Image
Each morning my characters greet me with misty faces willing, though chilled, to muster for another day's progress through the dazzling quicksand the marsh of blank paper.
John Updike
Image
Adversity in immunological doses has its uses more than that crushes.
John Updike
Image
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
Image
In no other sport must the spectator move.
John Updike
Image
How can the planet keep turning and turning and not get so bored it explodes?
John Updike
Image
Movies are, like sharp sunlight, merciless we do not imagine, we view.
John Updike
Image
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
Image
The first breathe of adultery is the freest.
John Updike
Image
Life, just as we first thought, is playing grownup.
John Updike
Image
The guarantee that our self enjoys an intended relation to the outer world is most, if not all, we ask from religion. God is the self projected onto reality by our natural and necessary optimism. He is the not-me personified.
John Updike
Image
A writer's self-consciousness, for which he is much scorned, is really a mode of interestedness, that inevitably turns outward.
John Updike