Quote

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

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
Pleasure
Plus
Antiques
American
Washington
Charmed
Business
London
Francisco
Reminiscent
Feelings
York
Combined
Spacious
Cannot
City
Boston
Certain
Cities
Impressed
Antique
Open
Intimacy
Denver
Feeling
Finds
Thriving

More quotes by John Updike

Image
Now that I am sixty, I see why the idea of elder wisdom has passed from currency.
John Updike
Image
Our tears fatten upon our memories of joy.
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
Our lives fade behind us before we die.
John Updike
Image
The illusion is an agreement between the reader and writer that this [story] will be like life. The emotional temperature drops when you have footnotes.
John Updike
Image
Why does one never hear of government funding for the preservation and encouragement of comic strips, girlie magazines and TV soap operas? Because these genres still hold the audience they were created to amuse and instruct.
John Updike
Image
If she’d been born at the right time they would have burned her over in Salem.
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
There is this quality, in things, of the right way seeming wrong at first.
John Updike
Image
Men emerge pale from the little printing plant at four sharp, ghosts for an instant, blinking, until the outdoor light overcomes the look of constant indoor light clinging to them.
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
It is in middles that extremes clash, where ambiguity restlessly rules.
John Updike
Image
We are each of us like our little blue planet, hung in black space, upheld by nothing but our mutual reassurances, our loving lies.
John Updike
Image
There is no doubt that I have lots of words inside me but at moments, like rush-hour traffic at the mouth of a tunnel, they jam.
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
All love is betrayal, in that it flatters life. The loveless man is best armed.
John Updike
Image
Yes, there is a ton of information on the web, but much of it is egregiously inaccurate, unedited, unattributed and juvenile.
John Updike
Image
The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.
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
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