Quote

Journalism has not only its social stimulations but its aesthetic virtues. An invitation into print, from however suspect a source, is an opportunity to make something beautiful, to discover within oneself a treasure that would otherwise have remained buried.

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
Opportunity
Treasure
Remained
Social
Discover
Suspect
Beautiful
Otherwise
Suspects
Something
Oneself
Virtues
Make
However
Aesthetic
Would
Source
Buried
Stimulation
Virtue
Print
Invitation
Within
Journalism
Invitations

More quotes by John Updike

Image
Art imitates Nature in this not to dare is to dwindle.
John Updike
Image
How sad, how strange, we make companions out of air and hurt them, so they will defy us, completing creation.
John Updike
Image
The throat: how strange, that there is not more erotic emphasis upon it. For here, through this compound pulsing pillar, our life makes its leap into spirit, and in the other direction gulps down what it needs of the material world.
John Updike
Image
The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.
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
Museums and bookstores should feel, I think, like vacant lots - places where the demands on us are our own demands, where the spirit can find exercise in unsupervised play.
John Updike
Image
The educational aspect of art shows has become overbearing: some of exhibits can leave you bleary from trying to read the walls. Presumably a piece of art is timeless and it can say something to us. You are taking away the right of art to talk for itself.
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
Until the 20th century it was generally assumed that a writer had said what he had to say in his works.
John Updike
Image
One does not go to Moscow to get fat.
John Updike
Image
The heart prefers to move against the grain of circumstance perversity is the souls very life.
John Updike
Image
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
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
Fiction is nothing less than the subtlest instrument for self-examination and self-display that Mankind has invented yet.
John Updike
Image
Chaos is God's body. Order is the Devil's chains.
John Updike
Image
Art is like baby shoes. When you coat them with gold, they can no longer be worn.
John Updike
Image
Seemed to me important in writing about people to be able to describe the sexual transactions between them. It's - for many people it's the height of, what they see, of ecstasy and poetry is in their sexual encounters. And furthermore, personality - human personality does not end in the bedroom, but persists.
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
We are fated to love one another we hardly exist outside our love, we are just animals without it, with a birth and a death and constant fear between. Our love has lifted us up , out of the dreadfulness of merely living.
John Updike
Image
Being naked approaches being revolutionary going barefoot is mere populism.
John Updike