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Musicians are very mysterious and wonderful people to me I don't know how they do it.
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
Wonderful
People
Musicians
Mysterious
Musician
More quotes by 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
Fiction is nothing less than the subtlest instrument for self-examination and self-display that Mankind has invented yet.
John Updike
How sad, how strange, we make companions out of air and hurt them, so they will defy us, completing creation.
John Updike
Within your own generation-the same songs, the same wars, the same attitudes toward those wars, the same rules and radio shows in the air-you can gauge the possibilities and impossibilities. With a person of another generation, you are treading water, playing with fire.
John Updike
What seems to sell books is good word-of-mouth, not promotion tours. I'm too old to believe that media promotion of a book really matters. What matters is how it will look 100 years from now, not how many copies are sold.
John Updike
Life is like an overlong drama through which we sit being nagged by the vague memories of having read the reviews.
John Updike
Men emerge pale from the little printing plant at four sharp, ghosts for an instant, blinking, until the outdoor light overcomes the look of constant indoor light clinging to them.
John Updike
When we try in good faith to believe in materialism, in the exclusive reality of the physical, we are asking our selves to step aside we are disavowing the very realm where we exist and where all things precious are kept - the realm of emotion and conscience, of memory and intention and sensation.
John Updike
Everybody who tells you how to act has whiskey on their breath.
John Updike
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
Writers take words seriously-perha ps the last professional class that does-and they struggle to steer their own through the crosswinds of meddling editors and careless typesetters and obtuse and malevolent reviewers into the lap of the ideal reader.
John Updike
The yearning for an afterlife is the opposite of selfish: it is love and praise for the world that we are privileged, in this complex interval of light, to witness and experience.
John Updike
Children are not a zoo of entertainingly exotic creatures, but an array of mirrors in which the human predicament leaps out at us.
John Updike
School is where you go between when your parents can't take you and industry can't take you.
John Updike
In general, the churches, visited by me often on weekdays... bore for me the same relation to God that billboards did to Coca-Cola they promoted thirst without quenching it.
John Updike
The other sad truth about golf spectatorship is that for today's pros it all comes down to the putting, and that the difference between a putt that drops and one that rims the cup, though teleologically enormous, is intellectually negligeable.
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
Life, too much of it, and not enough. The fear that it will end some day, and the fear that tomorrow will be the same as yesterday.
John Updike
Days, pale slices between nights, they blend, not exactly alike, transparencies so lightly tinted that only stacked all together do they darken to a fatal shade.
John Updike
What art offers is space - a certain breathing room for the spirit.
John Updike
