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
illumination white florida
The Florida sun seems not much a single thing overhead but a set of klieg lights that pursue you everywhere with an even white illumination.
passion government essence
The essence of government is concern for the widest possible public interest; the essence of the humanities, it seems to me, is private study, thought, and passion. Publicity is a essential to the one as privacy is to the other.
too-much affair asks
Affairs, ... , like everything else, ask too much.
progress needs
What we need is progress with an escape hatch.
world want enough
We were all brought up to want things and maybe the world isn't big enough for all that wanting. I don't know. I don't know anything
rotting too-much dandelions
So much love, too much love, it is our madness, it is rotting us out, exploding us like dandelion polls.
hate hatred shelter
...hate suits him better than forgiveness. Immersed in hate, he doesn't have to do anything; he can be paralyzed, and the rigidty of hatred makes a kind of shelter for him.
littles empires too-much
History. The more of it you have the more you have to live it. After a little while there gets to be too much of it to memorize and maybe that's when empires start to decline.
whiskey breaths
Everybody who tells you how to act has whiskey on their breath.
coffee eye men
…he is unlike the other customers. They sense it too, and look at him with hard eyes, eyes like little metal studs pinned into the white faces of young men [...] In the hush his entrance creates, the excessive courtesy the weary woman behind the counter shows him amplifies his strangeness. He orders coffee quietly and studies the rim of the cup to steady the sliding in his stomach. He had thought, he had read, that from shore to shore all America was the same. He wonders, Is it just these people I’m outside or is it all America?
dark hands two
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.
breakup caring trouble
That's the trouble with caring about anybody, you begin to feel overprotective. Then you begin to feel crowded.
betrayal men love-is
All love is betrayal, in that it flatters life. The loveless man is best armed.
basketball matter firsts
I once did something right. I played first-rate basketball. I really did. And after you're first-rate at something, no matter what, it kind of takes the kick out of being second-rate.