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American art in general... takes to surreal exaggerations and metaphors but its Puritan work ethic has little use for the playful self-indulgence behind Parisian Surrealism.
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
Self
Behinds
Metaphors
Work
Behind
Surreal
Takes
Ethic
American
Exaggeration
Exaggerations
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Indulgence
Parisian
Art
Metaphor
Surrealism
Littles
Ethics
Playful
Little
General
Puritan
More quotes by John Updike
Life is like an overlong drama through which we sit being nagged by the vague memories of having read the reviews.
John Updike
Baseball is meant to be fun, and not all the solemn money-men in fur-collared greatcoats, not all the scruffy media cameramen and sour-faced reporters that crowd around the dugouts can quite smother the exhilarating spaciousness and grace of this impudently relaxed sport, a game of innumerable potential redemptions and curious disappointments.
John Updike
Affairs, ... , like everything else, ask too much.
John Updike
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
How sad, how strange, we make companions out of air and hurt them, so they will defy us, completing creation.
John Updike
Art imitates Nature in this not to dare is to dwindle.
John Updike
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
I would especially like to re-court the Muse of poetry, who ran off with the mailman four years ago, and drops me only a scribbled postcard from time to time.
John Updike
The first breath of adultery is the freest after it, constraints aping marriage develop.
John Updike
The Founding Fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called an education.
John Updike
Golf appeals to the idiot in us and the child. Just how childlike golf players become is proven by their frequent inability to count past five.
John Updike
I did feel as though a number of critics had appointed themselves, when they sat down with a new book of mine, to rectify what they felt to be was my inflated reputation and so that the book in hand was not really given a chance but made a kind of weapon in the general attempt to bring me down to size.
John Updike
One does not go to Moscow to get fat.
John Updike
New York is of course many cities, and an exile does not return to the one he left.
John Updike
We take our bearings, daily, from others. To be sane is, to a great extent, to be sociable.
John Updike
Cities aren't like people they live on and on, even though their reason for being where they are has gone downriver and out to sea.
John Updike
But it seems to me that once you begin a gesture it's fatal not to go through with it.
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
But it is just two lovers, holding hands and in a hurry to reach their car, their locked hands a starfish leaping through the dark.
John Updike
The moment when the finished book or, better yet, a tightly packed carton of finished books arrives on my doorstep is the moment of truth, of culmination its bliss lasts as much as five minutes, until the first typographical error or production flaw is noticed.
John Updike
