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I never made a decision in my life that wasn't one hundred per cent selfish.
John Updike
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John Updike
Age: 76 †
Born: 1932
Born: March 18
Died: 2009
Died: January 27
Art Critic
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Essayist
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
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Science Fiction Writer
Writer
John Hoyer Updike
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Cent
More quotes by 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
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
Russia is the only country of the world you can be homesick for while you're still in it.
John Updike
We all begin life as parasites within the mother, and writers begin their existence imitatively, within the body of letters.
John Updike
The New England spirit does not seek solutions in a crowd raw light and solitariness are less dreaded than welcomed as enhancers of our essential selves.
John Updike
Life is a razor, you are always in hot water or a scrape.
John Updike
You have a life and there are these volumes on either side that go unvisited some day soon as the world winds he will lie beneath what he now stands on, dead as those insects whose sound he no longer hears, and the grass will go on growing, wild and blind.
John Updike
To be President of the United States, sir, is to act as advocate for a blind, venomous, and ungrateful client.
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
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
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.
John Updike
In a country this large and a language even larger ... there ought to be a living for somebody who cares and wants to entertain and instruct a reader.
John Updike
The measure of artistic merit is the length to which a writer is willing to go in following his own compulsions.
John Updike
The artist brings something into the world that didn't exist before, and he does it without destroying something else.
John Updike
Everybody who tells you how to act has whiskey on their breath.
John Updike
I'm not against TV I don't go on the morning talk shows because I'm not invited. If I was, I might go.
John Updike
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
Perfectionism is the enemy of creation, as extreme self- solitude is the enemy of well- being.
John Updike
Being able to write becomes a kind of shield, a way of hiding, a way of too instantly transforming pain into honey.
John Updike
If you're telling me I'm not mature, that's one thing I don't cry over since as far as I can make out it's the same thing as being dead.
John Updike
