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A photograph presents itself not only as a visual representation, but as evidence, more convincing than a painting because of the unimpeachable mechanical means whereby it was made. We do not trust the artist's flattering hand but we do trust film, and shadows, and light.

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
Artist
Visual
Whereby
Film
Photograph
Flattering
Hands
Shadow
Mechanical
Light
Evidence
Presents
Mean
Painting
Convincing
Made
Trust
Representation
Hand
Shadows
Means
Visuals
Unimpeachable

More quotes by John Updike

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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.
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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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Nothing feels worse than other people's good times.
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If you're telling me I'm not mature, that's one thing I don't cry over since as far as I can make out it's the same thing as being dead.
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Hemingway describes literary New York as a bottle full of tapeworms trying to feed on each other.
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Unlike the older, more humanly shaped arts, which begin with a seed and accumulate their form organically, photography clips its substance out of an actual continuum.
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Now that I am sixty, I see why the idea of elder wisdom has passed from currency.
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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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Art imitates Nature in this not to dare is to dwindle.
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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.
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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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What we need is progress with an escape hatch.
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Dream golf is simply golf played on another course. We chip from glass tables onto moving stairways we swing in a straightjacket, through masses of cobweb, and awaken not with any sense of unjust hazard but only with a regret that the round can never be completed, and that one of our phantasmal companions has kept the scorecard.
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The creative writer uses his life as well as being its victim he can control, in his work, the self-presentation that in actuality is at the mercy of a thousand accidents.
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Writing doesn't require drive. It's like saying a chicken has to have drive to lay an egg.
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I can't bear to finish things, beyond a certain point they get heavy. There's something so dead about a finished painting.
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What is the past, after all, but a vast sheet of darkness in which a few moments, pricked apparently at random, shine?
John Updike
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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.
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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.
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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.
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