Quote

Not judginess, but openness and curiosity are our proper business. I'm still trying to educate myself. I don't think you need to keep rehearsing your instincts. Far better to seek out models of what you can't do.

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
Need
Instinct
Needs
Models
Trying
Seek
Rehearsing
Think
Business
Instincts
Thinking
Keep
Openness
Stills
Educate
Still
Proper
Better
Curiosity

More quotes by John Updike

Image
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
Image
All men are mortal, and therefore all men are losers our profoundest loyalty goes out to the failed.
John Updike
Image
In general, the churches, visited by me often on weekdays... bore for me the same relation to God that billboards did to Coca-Cola they promoted thirst without quenching it.
John Updike
Image
In all the green world nothing feels as good as a woman's good nature.
John Updike
Image
An American in London...cannot but be impressed and charmed by the city. The momumentality of Washington, the thriving business of New York, the antique intimacy of Boston, plus a certain spacious and open feeling reminiscent of Denver and San Francisco-all these he finds combined for his pleasure.
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
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
There was clearly great charm and worth in a sport so quaintly perverse in its basic instructions. Hit down to make the ball rise. Swing easy to make it go far. Finish high to make it go straight.
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
There's always something new by looking at the same thing over and over.
John Updike
Image
Among the repulsions of atheism for me has been its drastic uninterestingness as an intellectual position.
John Updike
Image
irony is a way of having one's cake while appearing to eat it.
John Updike
Image
My only duty was to describe reality as it had come to me-to give the mundane its beautiful due.
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
Art imitates Nature in this not to dare is to dwindle.
John Updike
Image
You have a life and there are these volumes on either side that go unvisited some day soon as the world winds he will lie beneath what he now stands on, dead as those insects whose sound he no longer hears, and the grass will go on growing, wild and blind.
John Updike
Image
The great thing about the dead, they make space.
John Updike
Image
The breezes taste Of apple peel. The air is full Of smells to feel- Ripe fruit, old footballs, Burning brush, New books, erasers, Chalk, and such. The bee, his hive, Well-honeyed hum, And Mother cuts Chrysanthemums. Like plates washed clean With suds, the days Are polished with A morning haze.
John Updike
Image
There is this quality, in things, of the right way seeming wrong at first.
John Updike
Image
How can the planet keep turning and turning and not get so bored it explodes?
John Updike