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All men are mortal, and therefore all men are losers our profoundest loyalty goes out to the failed.
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
Failure
Profoundest
Goes
Losers
Men
Mortal
Loser
Mortals
Failed
Loyalty
Therefore
More quotes by John Updike
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
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
When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas.
John Updike
The muttered hint, Remember, you have a stroke here, freezes my joints like a blast from Siberia.
John Updike
Professionalism in art has this difficulty: To be professional is to be dependable, to be dependable is to be predictable, and predictability is esthetically boring - an anti-virtue in a field where we hope to be astonished and startled and at some deep level refreshed.
John Updike
Hoping to fashion a mirror, the lover doth polish the face of his beloved until he produces a skull.
John Updike
America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy.
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
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.
John Updike
Looking foolish does the spirit good. The need not to look foolish is one of youth's many burdens as we get older we are exempted from more and more.
John Updike
School is where you go between when your parents can't take you and industry can't take you.
John Updike
Mozart's music gives us permission to live.
John Updike
We're past the age of heroes and hero kings. ... Most of our lives are basically mundane and dull, and it's up to the writer to find ways to make them interesting.
John Updike
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
irony is a way of having one's cake while appearing to eat 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
The fact that we still live well cannot ease the feeling that we no longer live nobly.
John Updike
Government is either organized benevolence or organized madness its peculiar magnitude permits no shading.
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
By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.
John Updike
