Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
We all begin life as parasites within the mother, and writers begin their existence imitatively, within the body of letters.
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
Letters
Writers
Begin
Existence
Within
Mother
Body
Parasites
Life
Imitation
More quotes by John Updike
To be President of the United States, sir, is to act as advocate for a blind, venomous, and ungrateful client.
John Updike
It's not up to us what we learn, but merely whether we learn through joy or through pain.
John Updike
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.
John Updike
Of nothing but me I sing, lacking another song.
John Updike
A cynic is a kind of romantic who has aged.
John Updike
I can't bear to finish things, beyond a certain point they get heavy. There's something so dead about a finished painting.
John Updike
Our tears fatten upon our memories of joy.
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
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
Having children is something we think we ought to do because our parents did it, but when it is over the children are just other members of the human race, rather disappointingly.
John Updike
Art imitates Nature in this not to dare is to dwindle.
John Updike
Fiction is in danger of becoming a kind of poetry. Only other poets read it. Only other fiction writers care about it.
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 throat: how strange, that there is not more erotic emphasis upon it. For here, through this compound pulsing pillar, our life makes its leap into spirit, and in the other direction gulps down what it needs of the material world.
John Updike
Chaos is God's body. Order is the Devil's chains.
John Updike
In all the green world nothing feels as good as a woman's good nature.
John Updike
One of the nice things about having a lover, it makes you think about everything anew. The rest of your life becomes a kind of movie, flat and even rather funny.
John Updike
The fact that we still live well cannot ease the feeling that we no longer live nobly.
John Updike
Many men are more faithful to their golf partners than to their wives and have stuck with them longer.
John Updike
Why does one never hear of government funding for the preservation and encouragement of comic strips, girlie magazines and TV soap operas? Because these genres still hold the audience they were created to amuse and instruct.
John Updike
