Quote

A cynic is a kind of romantic who has aged.

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
Cynic
Aged
Romantic
Kind

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
It is easy to love people in memory the hard thing is to love them when they are there in front of you.
John Updike
Image
All men are mortal, and therefore all men are losers our profoundest loyalty goes out to the failed.
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
Wickedness was like food: once you got started it was hard to stop the gut expanded to take in more and more.
John Updike
Image
Do what the heart commands. The heart is our only guide.
John Updike
Image
Life, just as we first thought, is playing grownup.
John Updike
Image
It's not up to us what we learn, but merely whether we learn through joy or through pain.
John Updike
Image
You imagine a reader and try to keep the reader interested. That's storytelling. You also hope to reward the reader with a sense of a completed design, that somebody is in charge, and that while life is pointless, the book isn't pointless. The author knows where he is going. That's form.
John Updike
Image
Chaos is God's body. Order is the Devil's chains.
John Updike
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Within your own generation-the same songs, the same wars, the same attitudes toward those wars, the same rules and radio shows in the air-you can gauge the possibilities and impossibilities. With a person of another generation, you are treading water, playing with fire.
John Updike
Image
Life is like an overlong drama through which we sit being nagged by the vague memories of having read the reviews.
John Updike
Image
If you look at the best-seller list, it is mostly thrillers. Very few books attempt to create an image of the life we live. I knew there were writers who wore tweed coats and lived in Connecticut and somehow made a living, and that's what I aimed to do. I've tried to write as well as I can with books that say something to any reader.
John Updike
Image
All those little congruences and arabesques you prepared with such delicate anticipatory pleasure are gobbled up as if by pigs at a pastry cart.
John Updike
Image
I was made to feel I could do things. If you get this feeling early and can hold it until you're 15, you tend to never lose it.
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
Children are not a zoo of entertainingly exotic creatures, but an array of mirrors in which the human predicament leaps out at us.
John Updike
Image
Russia is the only country of the world you can be homesick for while you're still in it.
John Updike