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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
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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
Years
Word
Sold
Really
Seems
Sell
Good
Look
Sells
Book
Mouth
Matter
Mouths
Looks
Matters
Tours
Many
Media
Promotion
Believe
Books
Copies
More quotes by John Updike
irony is a way of having one's cake while appearing to eat it.
John Updike
Having children is something we think we ought to do because our parents did it, but when it is over the children are just other members of the human race, rather disappointingly.
John Updike
We all begin life as parasites within the mother, and writers begin their existence imitatively, within the body of letters.
John Updike
What more fiendish proof of cosmic irresponsibility than a Nature which, having invented sex as a way to mix genes, then permits to arise, amid all its perfumed and hypnotic inducements to mate, a tireless tribe of spirochetes and viruses that torture and kill us for following orders?
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
Wickedness was like food: once you got started it was hard to stop the gut expanded to take in more and more.
John Updike
When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas.
John Updike
Suddenly summoned to witness something great and horrendous, we keep fighting not to reduce it to our own smallness.
John Updike
Dream golf is simply golf played on another course. We chip from glass tables onto moving stairways we swing in a straightjacket, through masses of cobweb, and awaken not with any sense of unjust hazard but only with a regret that the round can never be completed, and that one of our phantasmal companions has kept the scorecard.
John Updike
A leader is one who, out of madness or goodness, volunteers to take upon himself the woe of the people. There are few men so foolish, hence the erratic quality of leadership in the world.
John Updike
It is in middles that extremes clash, where ambiguity restlessly rules.
John Updike
I'm willing to show good taste, if I can, in somebody else's living room, but our reading life is too short for a writer to be in any way polite. Since his words enter into another's brain in silence and intimacy, he should be as honest and explicit as we are with ourselves.
John Updike
Each morning my characters greet me with misty faces willing, though chilled, to muster for another day's progress through the dazzling quicksand the marsh of blank paper.
John Updike
There are some women that don't do it for some men. That's why they turn out so many models.
John Updike
The world keeps ending but new people too dumb to know it keep showing up as if the fun's just started.
John Updike
The difference between a childhood and a boyhood must be this: our childhood is what we alone have had our boyhood is what any boy in our environment would have had.
John Updike
Life is a razor, you are always in hot water or a scrape.
John Updike
Man makes one journey all his living days, Down through the realms of music and of art Down through the halls of fame and glorious praise Down through the tears and triumphs of the heart To some sweet woman waiting some place there. For her he builds his cities and makes war, Seeks gold and glorious wealth to store.
John Updike
By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.
John Updike
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
