John Updike
John Updike
John Hoyer Updikewas an American novelist, poet, short story writer, art critic, and literary critic...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth18 March 1932
CountryUnited States of America
writing eggs chickens
Writing doesn't require drive. It's like saying a chicken has to have drive to lay an egg.
water buckets
Money is like water in a leaky bucket: no sooner there, it begins to drip.
drinking beer thinking
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 the top of the ladder. It provokes our thinking, but what concrete evidence leads Updike to his conclusion ? The answer is in his second sentence : 'Consider the beer can.' To be even more specific, Updike was complaining that the invention of the pop-top ruined the aesthetic experience of drinking beer. 'Pop-top' and 'beer' are at the bottom of the ladder, 'aesthetic experience' at the top.
science mystery natural
Human was the music, natural was the static.
crush adversity use
Adversity in immunological doses has its uses; more than that crushes.
life water razors
Life is a razor, you are always in hot water or a scrape.
country writing care
In a country this large and a language even larger ... there ought to be a living for somebody who cares and wants to entertain and instruct a reader.
betrayal sacrifice loss
There is no such thing as static happiness. Happiness is a mixed thing, a thing compounded of sacrifices, and losses, and betrayals.
real heaven succeed
That a marriage ends is less than ideal; but all things end under heaven, and if temporality is held to be invalidating, then nothing real succeeds.
self examination fiction
Fiction is nothing less than the subtlest instrument for self-examination and self-display that Mankind has invented yet.
green-world feels good-nature
In all the green world nothing feels as good as a woman's good nature.
christian miracle hours
Let us not seek to make it less monstrous, for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty, lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are embarrassed by the miracle, and crushed by remonstrance.
women race aliens
Women are an alien race set down among us.
sex war world
To say that war is madness is like saying that sex is madness: true enough, from the standpoint of a stateless eunuch, but merely a provocative epigram for those who must make their arrangements in the world as given.