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Among the repulsions of atheism for me has been its drastic uninterestingness as an intellectual position.
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
Atheist
Atheism
Intellectual
Among
Position
Repulsion
Drastic
More quotes by John Updike
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
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
Prose should have a flow, the forward momentum of a certain energized weight it should feel like a voice tumbling in your ear.
John Updike
Do what the heart commands. The heart is our only guide.
John Updike
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
We are cruel enough without meaning to be.
John Updike
Looking foolish does the spirit good. The need not to look foolish is one of youth's many burdens as we get older we are exempted from more and more.
John Updike
As I get older, my childhood self becomes more accessible to me, but selectively, in images as stylized and suspect as moments remembered from a novel read years ago.
John Updike
For male and female alike, the bodies of the other sex are messages signaling what we must do - they are glowing signifiers of our own necessities.
John Updike
Living is a compromise, between doing what you want and doing what other people want.
John Updike
The essence of government is concern for the widest possible public interest the essence of the humanities, it seems to me, is private study, thought, and passion. Publicity is a essential to the one as privacy is to the other.
John Updike
Let us not seek to make it less monstrous, for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty, lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are embarrassed by the miracle, and crushed by remonstrance.
John Updike
Writing doesn't require drive. It's like saying a chicken has to have drive to lay an egg.
John Updike
President George] Bush talked to us like we were a bunch of morons and we ate it up. Can you imagine, the Pledge of Allegiance, read my lips-can you imagine such crap in this day and age?
John Updike
Government [is] an illusion the governed should not encourage.
John Updike
I'm willing to show good taste, if I can, in somebody else's living room, but our reading life is too short for a writer to be in any way polite. Since his words enter into another's brain in silence and intimacy, he should be as honest and explicit as we are with ourselves.
John Updike
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
What is the past, after all, but a vast sheet of darkness in which a few moments, pricked apparently at random, shine?
John Updike
What we need is progress with an escape hatch.
John Updike
The great thing about the dead, they make space.
John Updike
