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Affairs, ... , like everything else, ask too much.
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
Affairs
Affair
Asks
Else
Everything
Much
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More quotes by 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
There is always a chance of failure, of producing something totally unnecessary. But I guess that chance of failure is what makes tightrope walking, race-car driving.
John Updike
There was a beauty here bigger than the hurtling beauty of basketball, a beauty refined from country pastures, a game of solitariness, of waiting, waiting for the pitcher to complete his gaze toward first base and throw his lightning, a game whose very taste, of spit and dust and grass and sweat and leather and sun, was America.
John Updike
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
Appealingness is inversely proportional to attainability.
John Updike
There's always something new by looking at the same thing over and over.
John Updike
Photography is the first art wherein the tool does most of the work.
John Updike
Life is a video game. No matter how good you get, you are always zapped in the end.
John Updike
Children are not a zoo of entertainingly exotic creatures, but an array of mirrors in which the human predicament leaps out at us.
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
Fiction is in danger of becoming a kind of poetry. Only other poets read it. Only other fiction writers care about it.
John Updike
You can never get the smell of smoke out. Like the smell of failure in life.
John Updike
There is the fear that you somehow neglected to say what was really yours to say.
John Updike
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
Try to develop actual work habits, and even though you have a busy life, try to reserve an hour, say - or more - a day to write. Some very good things have been written on an hour a day.
John Updike
A writer's self-consciousness, for which he is much scorned, is really a mode of interestedness, that inevitably turns outward.
John Updike
If you look at the best-seller list, it is mostly thrillers. Very few books attempt to create an image of the life we live. I knew there were writers who wore tweed coats and lived in Connecticut and somehow made a living, and that's what I aimed to do. I've tried to write as well as I can with books that say something to any reader.
John Updike
We all begin life as parasites within the mother, and writers begin their existence imitatively, within the body of letters.
John Updike
Seemed to me important in writing about people to be able to describe the sexual transactions between them. It's - for many people it's the height of, what they see, of ecstasy and poetry is in their sexual encounters. And furthermore, personality - human personality does not end in the bedroom, but persists.
John Updike
Golf appeals to the idiot in us and the child. Just how childlike golf players become is proven by their frequent inability to count past five.
John Updike
