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I would especially like to re-court the Muse of poetry, who ran off with the mailman four years ago, and drops me only a scribbled postcard from time to time.

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
Like
Ran
Court
Poetry
Scribbled
Especially
Mailman
Four
Postcard
Years
Postcards
Would
Drops
Time
Muse

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Prose should have a flow, the forward momentum of a certain energized weight it should feel like a voice tumbling in your ear.
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Unlike the older, more humanly shaped arts, which begin with a seed and accumulate their form organically, photography clips its substance out of an actual continuum.
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Do what the heart commands. The heart is our only guide.
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Children are not a zoo of entertainingly exotic creatures, but an array of mirrors in which the human predicament leaps out at us.
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There's always something new by looking at the same thing over and over.
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Affairs, ... , like everything else, ask too much.
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It is in middles that extremes clash, where ambiguity restlessly rules.
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What you lose as you age is witnesses, the ones that watched from early on and cared, like your own little grandstand.
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But it is just two lovers, holding hands and in a hurry to reach their car, their locked hands a starfish leaping through the dark.
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What more fiendish proof of cosmic irresponsibility than a Nature which, having invented sex as a way to mix genes, then permits to arise, amid all its perfumed and hypnotic inducements to mate, a tireless tribe of spirochetes and viruses that torture and kill us for following orders?
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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.
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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.
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Students present themselves...like a succession of CDs whose shimmering surface gives no clue to their contents without the equipment to play them.
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Life, just as we first thought, is playing grownup.
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I'm willing to show good taste, if I can, in somebody else's living room, but our reading life is too short for a writer to be in any way polite. Since his words enter into another's brain in silence and intimacy, he should be as honest and explicit as we are with ourselves.
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How can you respect the world when you see it's being run by a bunch of kids turned old?
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The world keeps ending but new people too dumb to know it keep showing up as if the fun's just started.
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Life is a roller coaster, you have your ups and downs unless you fall off.
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There are some women that don't do it for some men. That's why they turn out so many models.
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Life is a video game. No matter how good you get, you are always zapped in the end.
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