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Life, just as we first thought, is playing grownup.
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
Thought
Firsts
First
Life
Grownup
Grownups
Playing
More quotes by John Updike
For male and female alike, the bodies of the other sex are messages signaling what we must do - they are glowing signifiers of our own necessities.
John Updike
Government [is] an illusion the governed should not encourage.
John Updike
We're past the age of heroes and hero kings. ... Most of our lives are basically mundane and dull, and it's up to the writer to find ways to make them interesting.
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
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
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
Fiction is nothing less than the subtlest instrument for self-examination and self-display that Mankind has invented yet.
John Updike
How can the planet keep turning and turning and not get so bored it explodes?
John Updike
Golf camaraderie, like that of astronauts and Antarctic explorers, is based on a common experience of transcendence fat or thin, scratch or duffer, we have been somerwhere together where non-golfers never go.
John Updike
The muttered hint, Remember, you have a stroke here, freezes my joints like a blast from Siberia.
John Updike
The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.
John Updike
The Florida sun seems not much a single thing overhead but a set of klieg lights that pursue you everywhere with an even white illumination.
John Updike
Our lives fade behind us before we die.
John Updike
We are each of us like our little blue planet, hung in black space, upheld by nothing but our mutual reassurances, our loving lies.
John Updike
Our tears fatten upon our memories of joy.
John Updike
Government money in the arts, I fear, can only deflect artists from their responsibility to find an authentic market for their products.
John Updike
But it seems to me that once you begin a gesture it's fatal not to go through with it.
John Updike
Movies took you right up to the edge but kept you safe.
John Updike
Try to develop actual work habits, and even though you have a busy life, try to reserve an hour, say - or more - a day to write. Some very good things have been written on an hour a day.
John Updike
Revolution is just one crowd taking power from another.
John Updike
