Quote

Affairs, ... , like everything else, ask too much.

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
Asks
Else
Everything
Much
Like
Affairs
Affair

More quotes by John Updike

Image
To be human is to be in the tense condition of a death-foreseeing, consciously libidinous animal. No other earthly creature suffers such a capacity for thought, such a complexity of envisioned but frustrated possibilities, such a troubling ability to question the tribal and biological imperatives.
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
I am sometimes visited by the heretical thought that there is no such thing as good and bad architecture, any more than there is good and bad nature. It is all in where you stand at the time.
John Updike
Image
Our lives fade behind us before we die.
John Updike
Image
Journalism has not only its social stimulations but its aesthetic virtues. An invitation into print, from however suspect a source, is an opportunity to make something beautiful, to discover within oneself a treasure that would otherwise have remained buried.
John Updike
Image
I would especially like to re-court the Muse of poetry, who ran off with the mailman four years ago, and drops me only a scribbled postcard from time to time.
John Updike
Image
Life, just as we first thought, is playing grownup.
John Updike
Image
There is this quality, in things, of the right way seeming wrong at first.
John Updike
Image
Prose should have a flow, the forward momentum of a certain energized weight it should feel like a voice tumbling in your ear.
John Updike
Image
Our tears fatten upon our memories of joy.
John Updike
Image
What seems to sell books is good word-of-mouth, not promotion tours. I'm too old to believe that media promotion of a book really matters. What matters is how it will look 100 years from now, not how many copies are sold.
John Updike
Image
Being naked approaches being revolutionary going barefoot is mere populism.
John Updike
Image
America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy.
John Updike
Image
Students present themselves...like a succession of CDs whose shimmering surface gives no clue to their contents without the equipment to play them.
John Updike
Image
All men are mortal, and therefore all men are losers our profoundest loyalty goes out to the failed.
John Updike
Image
Life is a roller coaster, you have your ups and downs unless you fall off.
John Updike
Image
I will try not to panic, to keep my standard of living modest and to work steadily, even shyly, in the spirit of those medieval carvers who so fondly sculpted the undersides of choir seats.
John Updike
Image
Movies took you right up to the edge but kept you safe.
John Updike
Image
irony is a way of having one's cake while appearing to eat it.
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