Quote

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

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
Kind
Bare
Crosses
Stones
Flow
Story
Facts
Stories
Glint
Enough
Trickle

More quotes by John Updike

Image
What you lose as you age is witnesses, the ones that watched from early on and cared, like your own little grandstand.
John Updike
Image
To be President of the United States, sir, is to act as advocate for a blind, venomous, and ungrateful client.
John Updike
Image
Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that's the stuff life is made of. Suspect each moment, for it is a thief, tiptoeing away with more than it brings.
John Updike
Image
Hemingway describes literary New York as a bottle full of tapeworms trying to feed on each other.
John Updike
Image
I can't bear to finish things, beyond a certain point they get heavy. There's something so dead about a finished painting.
John Updike
Image
Among the repulsions of atheism for me has been its drastic un-interestingness as an intellectual position. Where was the ingenuity, the ambiguity, the humanity of saying that the universe just happened to happen and that when we're dead we're dead?
John Updike
Image
To be human is to be in the tense condition of a death-foreseeing, consciously libidinous animal. No other earthly creature suffers such a capacity for thought, such a complexity of envisioned but frustrated possibilities, such a troubling ability to question the tribal and biological imperatives.
John Updike
Image
I did feel as though a number of critics had appointed themselves, when they sat down with a new book of mine, to rectify what they felt to be was my inflated reputation and so that the book in hand was not really given a chance but made a kind of weapon in the general attempt to bring me down to size.
John Updike
Image
Fraud makes the world go round.
John Updike
Image
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
Image
Yes, there is a ton of information on the web, but much of it is egregiously inaccurate, unedited, unattributed and juvenile.
John Updike
Image
Our lives fade behind us before we die.
John Updike
Image
Professionalism in art has this difficulty: To be professional is to be dependable, to be dependable is to be predictable, and predictability is esthetically boring - an anti-virtue in a field where we hope to be astonished and startled and at some deep level refreshed.
John Updike
Image
The muttered hint, Remember, you have a stroke here, freezes my joints like a blast from Siberia.
John Updike
Image
The New England spirit does not seek solutions in a crowd raw light and solitariness are less dreaded than welcomed as enhancers of our essential selves.
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
Mozart's music gives us permission to live.
John Updike
Image
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
Image
Everybody who tells you how to act has whiskey on their breath.
John Updike
Image
From infancy on, we are all spies the shame is not this but that the secrets to be discovered are so paltry and few.
John Updike