Does fiction, artistic writing, have much of a future? I must say it's on the way out. — John Updike Copy Share Image
Art is like baby shoes. When you coat them with gold, they can no longer be worn. — John Updike Copy Share Image
There should always be something gratuitous about art, just as there seems to be, according to the new-wave cosmologists, something gratuitous about… — John Updike Copy Share Image
A house, having been willfully purchased and furnished, tells us more than a body, and its description is a foremost resource of… — John Updike Copy Share Image
I see no intrinsic reason why a doubly talented artist might not arise and create a comic-strip novel masterpiece. — John Updike Copy Share Image
We are drawn to artists who tell us that art is difficult to do and takes a spiritual effort, because we are… — John Updike Copy Share Image
The measure of artistic merit is the length to which a writer is willing to go in following his own compulsions. — John Updike Copy Share Image
Unlike the older, more humanly shaped arts, which begin with a seed and accumulate their form organically, photography clips its substance out… — John Updike Copy Share Image
The artist brings something into the world that didn't exist before, and he does it without destroying something else. — John Updike Copy Share Image
American art in general... takes to surreal exaggerations and metaphors; but its Puritan work ethic has little use for the playful self-indulgence… — John Updike Copy Share Image
Man makes one journey all his living days, Down through the realms of music and of art; Down through the halls of… — John Updike Copy Share Image
The refusal to rest content, the willingness to risk excess on behalf of one's obsessions, is what distinguishes artists from entertainers, and… — John Updike Copy Share Image
Professionalism in art has this difficulty: To be professional is to be dependable, to be dependable is to be predictable, and predictability… — John Updike Copy Share Image
A photograph presents itself not only as a visual representation, but as evidence, more convincing than a painting because of the unimpeachable… — John Updike Copy Share Image
“My first thought, as a child, was that the artist brings something into the world that didn't exist before, and that he… — John Updike Copy Share Image
“We weren’t idealistic about much, we children of the 1950s, but we were certainly idealistic about art. We went into it with… — John Updike Copy Share Image
“The artist brings something into the world that didn't exist before, and that he does it without destroying something else. A kind… — John Updike Copy Share Image
The educational aspect of art shows has become overbearing: some of exhibits can leave you bleary from trying to read the walls.… — John Updike Copy Share Image
“Heade’s calm is unsteady, storm-stirred; we respond in our era to its hint of the nervous and the fearful. His weather is… — John Updike Copy Share Image
Whatever art offered the men and women of previous eras, what it offers our own, it seems to me, is space -… — John Updike Copy Share Image
“The river, tonally, does not recede, presenting the same lifeless grey near and far, a depthless plane upon which Schmitt’s dragging oars… — John Updike Copy Share Image
I would rather have as my patron a host of anonymous citizens digging into their own pockets for the price of a… — John Updike Copy Share Image
“Nevertheless, we react to one a bit differently than we do to Rothko’s hovering panels or Barnett Newman’s stripes, though Whistler does… — John Updike Copy Share Image
Government money in the arts, I fear, can only deflect artists from their responsibility to find an authentic market for their products. — John Updike Copy Share Image
Our artistic heroes tend to be those self-exercisers, like Picasso, and Nabokov, and Wallace Stevens, who rather defiantly kept playing past dark. — John Updike Copy Share Image
We don't really want to think that the artist is only very skilled, that he has merely devoted his life to perfecting… — John Updike Copy Share Image
Customs and convictions change; respectable people are the last to know, or to admit, the change, and the ones most offended by… — John Updike Copy Share 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 Copy Share
I assume my stance, and take back the club, low, slowly; at the top, my eyes fog over, and my joints dip and swirl… — John Updike Copy Share
The New England spirit does not seek solutions in a crowd; raw light and solitariness are less dreaded than welcomed as enhancers of our… — John Updike Copy Share
Families, doing everything for each other out of imagined obligation and always getting in each other's way, what a tangle. — John Updike Copy Share
“The mind cannot fall asleep as long as it watches itself. Only when the mind moves unwatched and becomes absorbed in images that tug… — John Updike Copy Share
In fiction, imaginary people become realer to us than any named celebrity glimpsed in a series of rumored events, whose causes and subtler ramifications… — John Updike Copy Share
“Her hair had been going gray as long as he could remember; she bundled it behind in a bun held with hairpins that he… — John Updike Copy Share
I can't bear to finish things, beyond a certain point they get heavy. There's something so dead about a finished painting. — John Updike Copy Share
“Some people find fall depressing, others hate spring. I've always been a spring person myself. All that growth, you can feel Nature groaning, the… — John Updike Copy Share
