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Pressed, I would define spirituality as the shadow of light humanity casts as it moves through the darkness of everything that can be explained.
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
Light
Moves
Everything
Define
Would
Casts
Spirituality
Shadow
Darkness
Humanity
Pressed
Moving
Explained
More quotes by John Updike
Everybody who tells you how to act has whiskey on their breath.
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
Man makes one journey all his living days, Down through the realms of music and of art Down through the halls of fame and glorious praise Down through the tears and triumphs of the heart To some sweet woman waiting some place there. For her he builds his cities and makes war, Seeks gold and glorious wealth to store.
John Updike
Each morning my characters greet me with misty faces willing, though chilled, to muster for another day's progress through the dazzling quicksand the marsh of blank paper.
John Updike
I love my government not least for the extent to which it leaves me alone.
John Updike
Hemingway describes literary New York as a bottle full of tapeworms trying to feed on each other.
John Updike
Perfectionism is the enemy of creation, as extreme self- solitude is the enemy of well- being.
John Updike
One does not go to Moscow to get fat.
John Updike
I'm somewhat shy about the brutal facts of being a carnivore. I don't like meat to look like animals. I prefer it in the form of sausages, hamburger and meat loaf, far removed from the living thing.
John Updike
Being naked approaches being revolutionary going barefoot is mere populism.
John Updike
Four years was enough of Harvard. I still had a lot to learn, but had been given the liberating notion that now I could teach myself.
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
Hope bases vast premises on foolish accidents, and reads a word where in fact only a scribble exists.
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
My only duty was to describe reality as it had come to me-to give the mundane its beautiful due.
John Updike
Writers take words seriously-perha ps the last professional class that does-and they struggle to steer their own through the crosswinds of meddling editors and careless typesetters and obtuse and malevolent reviewers into the lap of the ideal reader.
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
American art in general... takes to surreal exaggerations and metaphors but its Puritan work ethic has little use for the playful self-indulgence behind Parisian Surrealism.
John Updike
The creative writer uses his life as well as being its victim he can control, in his work, the self-presentation that in actuality is at the mercy of a thousand accidents.
John Updike
Families, doing everything for each other out of imagined obligation and always getting in each other's way, what a tangle.
John Updike
