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We all begin life as parasites within the mother, and writers begin their existence imitatively, within the body of letters.
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
Writers
Begin
Existence
Within
Mother
Body
Parasites
Life
Imitation
Letters
More quotes by 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
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.
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
Life is a roller coaster, you have your ups and downs unless you fall off.
John Updike
It is not enough for a story to flow. It has to kind of trickle and glint as it crosses over the stones of the bare facts.
John Updike
Of nothing but me I sing, lacking another song.
John Updike
The illusion is an agreement between the reader and writer that this [story] will be like life. The emotional temperature drops when you have footnotes.
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
How can you respect the world when you see it's being run by a bunch of kids turned old?
John Updike
Living is a compromise, between doing what you want and doing what other people want.
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
Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right or better.
John Updike
Government is either organized benevolence or organized madness its peculiar magnitude permits no shading.
John Updike
If she’d been born at the right time they would have burned her over in Salem.
John Updike
There is no such thing as static happiness. Happiness is a mixed thing, a thing compounded of sacrifices, and losses, and betrayals.
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
How can the planet keep turning and turning and not get so bored it explodes?
John Updike
America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy.
John Updike
All men are mortal, and therefore all men are losers our profoundest loyalty goes out to the failed.
John Updike
Perfectionism is the enemy of creation, as extreme self- solitude is the enemy of well- being.
John Updike
