Quote

The moment when the finished book or, better yet, a tightly packed carton of finished books arrives on my doorstep is the moment of truth, of culmination its bliss lasts as much as five minutes, until the first typographical error or production flaw is noticed.

John Updike

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

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
Truth
Errors
Tightly
Better
Finished
Arrives
Firsts
Minutes
Noticed
Typographical
Book
Books
Flaws
Carton
First
Five
Bliss
Culmination
Much
Lasts
Error
Doorstep
Moment
Production
Flaw
Moments
Productions
Packed

More quotes by John Updike

Image
The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.
John Updike
Image
You write because you don't talk very well, and maybe one of the reasons that I was determined to write was that I wasn't an orator, unlike my mother and my grandfather, who both spoke beautifully and spoke all the time. Maybe I grew up with too many voices around me, as a matter of fact.
John Updike
Image
Chaos is God's body. Order is the Devil's chains.
John Updike
Image
Hemingway describes literary New York as a bottle full of tapeworms trying to feed on each other.
John Updike
Image
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
Image
Inspiration arrives as a packet of material to be delivered.
John Updike
Image
By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.
John Updike
Image
Man is a means for turning things into spirit and turning spirit into things.
John Updike
Image
In all the green world nothing feels as good as a woman's good nature.
John Updike
Image
Wickedness was like food: once you got started it was hard to stop the gut expanded to take in more and more.
John Updike
Image
Life is a roller coaster, you have your ups and downs unless you fall off.
John Updike
Image
To be a human being is to be in a state of tension between your appetites and your dreams, and the social realities around you and your obligations to your fellow man.
John Updike
Image
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
Image
Russia is the only country of the world you can be homesick for while you're still in it.
John Updike
Image
Musicians are very mysterious and wonderful people to me I don't know how they do it.
John Updike
Image
Life, just as we first thought, is playing grownup.
John Updike
Image
The muttered hint, Remember, you have a stroke here, freezes my joints like a blast from Siberia.
John Updike
Image
America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy.
John Updike
Image
Hope bases vast premises on foolish accidents, and reads a word where in fact only a scribble exists.
John Updike
Image
Affairs, ... , like everything else, ask too much.
John Updike