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The difference between a childhood and a boyhood must be this: our childhood is what we alone have had our boyhood is what any boy in our environment would have had.

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
Must
Children
Boyhood
Would
Childhood
Difference
Boys
Environment
Differences
Alone

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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.
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Musicians are very mysterious and wonderful people to me I don't know how they do it.
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Life is a roller coaster, you have your ups and downs unless you fall off.
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Now that I am sixty, I see why the idea of elder wisdom has passed from currency.
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I must go to Nature disarmed of perspective and stretch myself like a large transparent canvas upon her in the hope that, my submission being perfect, the imprint of a beautiful and useful truth would be taken.
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The artist brings something into the world that didn't exist before, and he does it without destroying something else.
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Cities aren't like people they live on and on, even though their reason for being where they are has gone downriver and out to sea.
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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.
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The literary scene is a kind of Medusa’s raft, small and sinking, and one’s instinct when a newcomer tries to clamber aboard is to step on his fingers.
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Life is like an overlong drama through which we sit being nagged by the vague memories of having read the reviews.
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It is in middles that extremes clash, where ambiguity restlessly rules.
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In all the green world nothing feels as good as a woman's good nature.
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There is this quality, in things, of the right way seeming wrong at first.
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The breezes taste Of apple peel. The air is full Of smells to feel- Ripe fruit, old footballs, Burning brush, New books, erasers, Chalk, and such. The bee, his hive, Well-honeyed hum, And Mother cuts Chrysanthemums. Like plates washed clean With suds, the days Are polished with A morning haze.
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An American in London...cannot but be impressed and charmed by the city. The momumentality of Washington, the thriving business of New York, the antique intimacy of Boston, plus a certain spacious and open feeling reminiscent of Denver and San Francisco-all these he finds combined for his pleasure.
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The Florida sun seems not much a single thing overhead but a set of klieg lights that pursue you everywhere with an even white illumination.
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I was made to feel I could do things. If you get this feeling early and can hold it until you're 15, you tend to never lose it.
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Mozart's music gives us permission to live.
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Suddenly summoned to witness something great and horrendous, we keep fighting not to reduce it to our own smallness.
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I can't bear to finish things, beyond a certain point they get heavy. There's something so dead about a finished painting.
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