All John Updike Quotes
- Life is a video game. No matter how good you get, you are always zapped in the end. End
- Life is a nacho. It can be yummy-crunchy or squishy-yucky. It just depends on how long it takes for you to start eating it. Crunchy
- 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… Air
- Hoping to fashion a mirror, the lover doth polish the face of his beloved until he produces a skull. Beloved
- Writing doesn't require drive. It's like saying a chicken has to have drive to lay an egg. Chicken
- Money is like water in a leaky bucket: no sooner there, it begins to drip. Begins
- Each day, we wake slightly altered, and the person we were yesterday is dead. So why, one could say, be afraid of death, when death… Afraid
- I think books should have secrets, like people do. Book
- An old essay by John Updike begins, 'We live in an era of gratuitous inventions and negative improvements.' That language is general and abstract, near… Abstract
- Human was the music, natural was the static. Human
- Adversity in immunological doses has its uses; more than that crushes. Adversity
- It's not up to us what we learn, but merely whether we learn through joy or through pain. Education
- Prose should have a flow, the forward momentum of a certain energized weight; it should feel like a voice tumbling in your ear. Certain
- There's always something new by looking at the same thing over and over. Always Something
- The literary scene is a kind of Medusa’s raft, small and sinking, and one’s instinct when a newcomer tries to clamber aboard is to step… Aboard
- 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… Early
- It's great to have an enemy. Sharpens your senses. Enemy
- Green grass, green grandstands, green concession stalls, green paper cups, green folding chairs and visors for sale, green and white ropes, green-topped Georgia pines. If… Chairs
- There is the fear that you somehow neglected to say what was really yours to say. Fear
- Writers take words seriously-perha ps the last professional class that does-and they struggle to steer their own through the crosswinds of meddling editors and careless… Careless
- 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… Cry
- I must go to Nature disarmed of perspective and stretch myself like a large transparent canvas upon her in the hope that, my submission being… Beautiful
- Hemingway describes literary New York as a bottle full of tapeworms trying to feed on each other. Bottle
- Vagueness and procrastination are ever a comfort to the frail in spirit. Comfort
- As souls must cry when they awaken in tiny babies and find themselves far from heaven Awaken