Quote

Chaos is God's body. Order is the Devil's chains.

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
Chains
Chaos
Devil
Order
Body

More quotes by 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
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
Image
The first breath of adultery is the freest after it, constraints aping marriage develop.
John Updike
Image
There are some women that don't do it for some men. That's why they turn out so many models.
John Updike
Image
The scrape and snap of Keds on loose alley pebbles seems to catapult their voices high into the moist March air blue above the wires.
John Updike
Image
In no other sport must the spectator move.
John Updike
Image
There is no such thing as static happiness. Happiness is a mixed thing, a thing compounded of sacrifices, and losses, and betrayals.
John Updike
Image
Our lives fade behind us before we die.
John Updike
Image
You do things and do things and nobody really has a clue.
John Updike
Image
It is not enough for a story to flow. It has to kind of trickle and glint as it crosses over the stones of the bare facts.
John Updike
Image
I never made a decision in my life that wasn't one hundred per cent selfish.
John Updike
Image
Hoping to fashion a mirror, the lover doth polish the face of his beloved until he produces a skull.
John Updike
Image
There was clearly great charm and worth in a sport so quaintly perverse in its basic instructions. Hit down to make the ball rise. Swing easy to make it go far. Finish high to make it go straight.
John Updike
Image
Not judginess, but openness and curiosity are our proper business. I'm still trying to educate myself. I don't think you need to keep rehearsing your instincts. Far better to seek out models of what you can't do.
John Updike
Image
The - writing is a kind of act of aggression, and a person who is not aggressive in his normal, may I say, intercourse with humanity might well be an aggressive writer.
John Updike
Image
Affairs, ... , like everything else, ask too much.
John Updike
Image
Fraud makes the world go round.
John Updike
Image
Families, doing everything for each other out of imagined obligation and always getting in each other's way, what a tangle.
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
But it seems to me that once you begin a gesture it's fatal not to go through with it.
John Updike