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A writer's self-consciousness, for which he is much scorned, is really a mode of interestedness, that inevitably turns outward.
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
Much
Scorned
Really
Outward
Mode
Inevitably
Writer
Consciousness
Turns
Self
More quotes by John Updike
Women, fire in their crotch, won't burn out, begin by fighting off pricks, end by going wild hunting for one that still works.
John Updike
The guarantee that our self enjoys an intended relation to the outer world is most, if not all, we ask from religion. God is the self projected onto reality by our natural and necessary optimism. He is the not-me personified.
John Updike
The muttered hint, Remember, you have a stroke here, freezes my joints like a blast from Siberia.
John Updike
Four years was enough of Harvard. I still had a lot to learn, but had been given the liberating notion that now I could teach myself.
John Updike
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
It's not up to us what we learn, but merely whether we learn through joy or through pain.
John Updike
Musicians are very mysterious and wonderful people to me I don't know how they do it.
John Updike
Nothing feels worse than other people's good times.
John Updike
Is not the decisive difference between comedy and tragedy that tragedy denies us another chance?
John Updike
I'm somewhat shy about the brutal facts of being a carnivore. I don't like meat to look like animals. I prefer it in the form of sausages, hamburger and meat loaf, far removed from the living thing.
John Updike
Fiction is nothing less than the subtlest instrument for self-examination and self-display that Mankind has invented yet.
John Updike
History. The more of it you have the more you have to live it. After a little while there gets to be too much of it to memorize and maybe that's when empires start to decline.
John Updike
The artist brings something into the world that didn't exist before, and he does it without destroying something else.
John Updike
The difficulty with humorists is that they will mix what they believe with what they don't whichever seems likelier to win an effect.
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
Being able to write becomes a kind of shield, a way of hiding, a way of too instantly transforming pain into honey.
John Updike
Fiction is in danger of becoming a kind of poetry. Only other poets read it. Only other fiction writers care about it.
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
You write because you don't talk very well, and maybe one of the reasons that I was determined to write was that I wasn't an orator, unlike my mother and my grandfather, who both spoke beautifully and spoke all the time. Maybe I grew up with too many voices around me, as a matter of fact.
John Updike
My only duty was to describe reality as it had come to me-to give the mundane its beautiful due.
John Updike
