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
want down-and young-writers
I really don't want to encourage young writers. Keep them down and out and silent is my motto.
doe feels urgent
Why does life feel, to us as we experience it, so desperately urgent and so utterly pointless at the same time?
night together shade
Days, pale slices between nights, they blend, not exactly alike, transparencies so lightly tinted that only stacked all together do they darken to a fatal shade.
dream reality men
To be a human being is to be in a state of tension between your appetites and your dreams, and the social realities around you and your obligations to your fellow man.
nature men echoes
Away, away, from men and towns, To the wild wood and the downs — To the silent wilderness Where the soul need not repress Its music lest it should not find An echo in another's mind.
women men turns
There are some women that don't do it for some men. That's why they turn out so many models.
stories stones flow
It is not enough for a story to flow. It has to kind of trickle and glint as it crosses over the stones of the bare facts.
selfish party boys
In fact we do not try to picture the afterlife, nor is it our selves in our nervous tics and optical flecks that we wish to perpetuate; it is the self as the window on the world that we can't bear to thinkof shutting. My mind when I was a boy of ten or eleven sent up its silent scream at the thought of future aeons -- at the thought of the cosmic party going on without me. The yearning for an afterlife is the opposite of selfish: it is love and praise of the world that we are privileged, in this complex interval of light, to witness and experience.
music giving permission
Mozart's music gives us permission to live.
cake way irony
irony is a way of having one's cake while appearing to eat it.
photography art tools
Photography is the first art wherein the tool does most of the work.
teacher husband school
I remember one English teacher in the eighth grade, Florence Schrack, whose husband also taught at the high school. I thought what she said made sense, and she parsed sentences on the blackboard and gave me, I'd like to think, some sense of English grammar and that there is a grammar, that those commas serve a purpose and that a sentence has a logic, that you can break it down. I've tried not to forget those lessons, and to treat the English language with respect as a kind of intricate tool.
atrocities slave creation
Atrocity is truly emperor; All things that thrive are slaves of cruel Creation.
infancy-is secret spy
From infancy on, we are all spies; the shame is not this but that the secrets to be discovered are so paltry and few.