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
enemy senses
It's great to have an enemy. Sharpens your senses.
winning years white
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 justice were poetic, Hubert Green would win it every year.
struggle editors class
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 typesetters and obtuse and malevolent reviewers into the lap of the ideal reader.
baby heaven soul
As souls must cry when they awaken in tiny babies and find themselves far from heaven
beautiful reality giving
My only duty was to describe reality as it had come to me-to give the mundane its beautiful due.
song lacking
Of nothing but me I sing, lacking another song.
beautiful moving math
Phyllis explained to him, trying to give of her deeper self, 'Don't you find it so beautiful, math? Like an endless sheet of gold chains, each link locked into the one before it, the theorems and functions, one thing making the next inevitable. It's music, hanging there in the middle of space, meaning nothing but itself, and so moving...'
food tomatoes plant
Of plants tomatoes seemed the most human, eager and fragile and prone to rot.
cutting boys hair
The scissors cut the long-grown hair; The razor scrapes the remnant fuzz. Small-jawed, weak-chinned, big-eyed, I stare At the forgotten boy I was.
spring flower farewell
It’s spring! Farewell To chills and colds! The blushing, girlish World unfolds Each flower, leaf And blade of sod— Small letters sent To her from God.
new-york cities return
New York is of course many cities, and an exile does not return to the one he left.
memories believe reality
When we try in good faith to believe in materialism, in the exclusive reality of the physical, we are asking our selves to step aside; we are disavowing the very realm where we exist and where all things precious are kept - the realm of emotion and conscience, of memory and intention and sensation.
america ungrateful president
To be President of the United States, sir, is to act as advocate for a blind, venomous, and ungrateful client.
cds play giving
Students present themselves...like a succession of CDs whose shimmering surface gives no clue to their contents without the equipment to play them.