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A cynic is a kind of romantic who has aged.

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
Cynic
Aged
Romantic
Kind

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One does not go to Moscow to get fat.
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Prose should have a flow, the forward momentum of a certain energized weight it should feel like a voice tumbling in your ear.
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We all begin life as parasites within the mother, and writers begin their existence imitatively, within the body of letters.
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Our tears fatten upon our memories of joy.
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You do things and do things and nobody really has a clue.
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I must go to Nature disarmed of perspective and stretch myself like a large transparent canvas upon her in the hope that, my submission being perfect, the imprint of a beautiful and useful truth would be taken.
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What art offers is space - a certain breathing room for the spirit.
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What you lose as you age is witnesses, the ones that watched from early on and cared, like your own little grandstand.
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Fiction is nothing less than the subtlest instrument for self-examination and self-display that Mankind has invented yet.
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Do what the heart commands. The heart is our only guide.
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The Founding Fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called an education.
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There was a beauty here bigger than the hurtling beauty of basketball, a beauty refined from country pastures, a game of solitariness, of waiting, waiting for the pitcher to complete his gaze toward first base and throw his lightning, a game whose very taste, of spit and dust and grass and sweat and leather and sun, was America.
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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.
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Hope bases vast premises on foolish accidents, and reads a word where in fact only a scribble exists.
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The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.
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There's always something new by looking at the same thing over and over.
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Chaos is God's body. Order is the Devil's chains.
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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.
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Children are not a zoo of entertainingly exotic creatures, but an array of mirrors in which the human predicament leaps out at us.
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Hemingway describes literary New York as a bottle full of tapeworms trying to feed on each other.
John Updike