Quote

I will try not to panic, to keep my standard of living modest and to work steadily, even shyly, in the spirit of those medieval carvers who so fondly sculpted the undersides of choir seats.

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
Work
Seats
Sculpted
Standard
Carver
Standards
Fondly
Living
Steadily
Keep
Choir
Spirit
Medieval
Even
Modest
Trying
Panic
Shyly

More quotes by John Updike

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The difficulty is, all swing thoughts decay, like radium. What burnt up the course on Wednesday has turned to lead on Sunday. Yet it does not do to have a blank mind: the terrible hugeness of the course will rush into the vacuum and the ball will spray like a thing berserk.
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It is in middles that extremes clash, where ambiguity restlessly rules.
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A cynic is a kind of romantic who has aged.
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Many men are more faithful to their golf partners than to their wives and have stuck with them longer.
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There's always something new by looking at the same thing over and over.
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Our lives fade behind us before we die.
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Is not the decisive difference between comedy and tragedy that tragedy denies us another chance?
John Updike
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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.
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All men are mortal, and therefore all men are losers our profoundest loyalty goes out to the failed.
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You imagine a reader and try to keep the reader interested. That's storytelling. You also hope to reward the reader with a sense of a completed design, that somebody is in charge, and that while life is pointless, the book isn't pointless. The author knows where he is going. That's form.
John Updike
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The measure of artistic merit is the length to which a writer is willing to go in following his own compulsions.
John Updike
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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
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Until the 20th century it was generally assumed that a writer had said what he had to say in his works.
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Do what the heart commands. The heart is our only guide.
John Updike
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The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.
John Updike
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The refusal to rest content, the willingness to risk excess on behalf of one's obsessions, is what distinguishes artists from entertainers, and what makes some artists adventurers on behalf of us all.
John Updike
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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
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All love is betrayal, in that it flatters life. The loveless man is best armed.
John Updike
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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.
John Updike
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How sad, how strange, we make companions out of air and hurt them, so they will defy us, completing creation.
John Updike