Quote

Cities aren't like people they live on and on, even though their reason for being where they are has gone downriver and out to sea.

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
Gone
Though
Reason
Live
Even
Like
Sea
People
Aren
Cities

More quotes by John Updike

Image
I never made a decision in my life that wasn't one hundred per cent selfish.
John Updike
Image
Now that I am sixty, I see why the idea of elder wisdom has passed from currency.
John Updike
Image
Writing doesn't require drive. It's like saying a chicken has to have drive to lay an egg.
John Updike
Image
I must go to Nature disarmed of perspective and stretch myself like a large transparent canvas upon her in the hope that, my submission being perfect, the imprint of a beautiful and useful truth would be taken.
John Updike
Image
Prose should have a flow, the forward momentum of a certain energized weight it should feel like a voice tumbling in your ear.
John Updike
Image
Photography is the first art wherein the tool does most of the work.
John Updike
Image
America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy.
John Updike
Image
My only duty was to describe reality as it had come to me-to give the mundane its beautiful due.
John Updike
Image
One of the nice things about having a lover, it makes you think about everything anew. The rest of your life becomes a kind of movie, flat and even rather funny.
John Updike
Image
Fiction is in danger of becoming a kind of poetry. Only other poets read it. Only other fiction writers care about it.
John Updike
Image
The Founding Fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called an education.
John Updike
Image
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
Image
One does not go to Moscow to get fat.
John Updike
Image
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.
John Updike
Image
There was a beauty here bigger than the hurtling beauty of basketball, a beauty refined from country pastures, a game of solitariness, of waiting, waiting for the pitcher to complete his gaze toward first base and throw his lightning, a game whose very taste, of spit and dust and grass and sweat and leather and sun, was America.
John Updike
Image
Until the 20th century it was generally assumed that a writer had said what he had to say in his works.
John Updike
Image
Our lives fade behind us before we die.
John Updike
Image
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
Image
What is the past, after all, but a vast sheet of darkness in which a few moments, pricked apparently at random, shine?
John Updike
Image
A photograph presents itself not only as a visual representation, but as evidence, more convincing than a painting because of the unimpeachable mechanical means whereby it was made. We do not trust the artist's flattering hand but we do trust film, and shadows, and light.
John Updike