Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
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
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
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
Must
Children
Boyhood
Would
Childhood
Difference
Boys
Environment
Differences
Alone
More quotes by John Updike
Man is a means for turning things into spirit and turning spirit into things.
John Updike
As I get older, my childhood self becomes more accessible to me, but selectively, in images as stylized and suspect as moments remembered from a novel read years ago.
John Updike
There are some women that don't do it for some men. That's why they turn out so many models.
John Updike
Hemingway describes literary New York as a bottle full of tapeworms trying to feed on each other.
John Updike
One does not go to Moscow to get fat.
John Updike
Life is a razor, you are always in hot water or a scrape.
John Updike
Everybody who tells you how to act has whiskey on their breath.
John Updike
A cynic is a kind of romantic who has aged.
John Updike
When we try in good faith to believe in materialism, in the exclusive reality of the physical, we are asking our selves to step aside we are disavowing the very realm where we exist and where all things precious are kept - the realm of emotion and conscience, of memory and intention and sensation.
John Updike
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
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
Yes, there is a ton of information on the web, but much of it is egregiously inaccurate, unedited, unattributed and juvenile.
John Updike
Affairs, ... , like everything else, ask too much.
John Updike
Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that's the stuff life is made of. Suspect each moment, for it is a thief, tiptoeing away with more than it brings.
John Updike
A narrative is like a room on whose walls a number of false doors have been painted while within the narrative, we have many apparent choices of exit, but when the author leads us to one particular door, we know it is the right one because it opens.
John Updike
Golf camaraderie, like that of astronauts and Antarctic explorers, is based on a common experience of transcendence fat or thin, scratch or duffer, we have been somerwhere together where non-golfers never go.
John Updike
Fiction is nothing less than the subtlest instrument for self-examination and self-display that Mankind has invented yet.
John Updike
For male and female alike, the bodies of the other sex are messages signaling what we must do - they are glowing signifiers of our own necessities.
John Updike
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
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