Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
You can never get the smell of smoke out. Like the smell of failure in life.
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
Smell
Failure
Never
Life
Like
Smoke
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
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
Baseball is meant to be fun, and not all the solemn money-men in fur-collared greatcoats, not all the scruffy media cameramen and sour-faced reporters that crowd around the dugouts can quite smother the exhilarating spaciousness and grace of this impudently relaxed sport, a game of innumerable potential redemptions and curious disappointments.
John Updike
But it seems to me that once you begin a gesture it's fatal not to go through with it.
John Updike
Revolution is just one crowd taking power from another.
John Updike
The breezes taste Of apple peel. The air is full Of smells to feel- Ripe fruit, old footballs, Burning brush, New books, erasers, Chalk, and such. The bee, his hive, Well-honeyed hum, And Mother cuts Chrysanthemums. Like plates washed clean With suds, the days Are polished with A morning haze.
John Updike
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.
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
There's always something new by looking at the same thing over and over.
John Updike
The Englishman is under no constitutional obligation to believe that all men are created equal. The American agony is therefore scarcely intelligible, like a saint's self-flagellation viewed by an atheist.
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
America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy.
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
It is easy to love people in memory the hard thing is to love them when they are there in front of you.
John Updike
I'm not against TV I don't go on the morning talk shows because I'm not invited. If I was, I might go.
John Updike
Living is a compromise, between doing what you want and doing what other people want.
John Updike
Smaller than a breadbox, bigger than a TV remote, the average book fits into the human hand with a seductive nestling, a kiss of texture, whether of cover cloth, glazed jacket, or flexible paperback.
John Updike
Among the repulsions of atheism for me has been its drastic uninterestingness as an intellectual position.
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
Until the 20th century it was generally assumed that a writer had said what he had to say in his works.
John Updike
