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
boy cut forgotten shaving stare
Upon shaving off one's beard." The scissors cut the long-grown hair; the razor scrapes the remnant fuzz. Small-jawed, weak-chinned, bug-eyed, I stare at the forgotten boy I was.
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.
new-york book cutting
Our brains are no longer conditioned for reverence and awe. We cannot imagine a Second Coming that would not be cut down to size by the televised evening news, or a Last Judgment not subject to pages of holier-than-thou second-guessing in The New York Review of Books.
might
Without books, we might just melt into the airwaves and be just another set of blips.
artistic kept playing rather tend wallace
Our artistic heroes tend to be those self-exercisers, like Picasso, and Nabokov, and Wallace Stevens, who rather defiantly kept playing past dark.
exile extremes grandeur host human likes plays york
My complaint, as an exile who once loved New York and who likes to return a half-dozen times a year, is not that it plays host to extremes of the human condition: There is grandeur in that, and necessity.
diminishes perception possession
Midas's Law: Possession diminishes perception of value, immediately
hard man played
Somehow, it is hard to dislike a man once you have played a round of golf with him.
artist brings destroying exist
The artist brings something into the world that didn't exist before and he does it without destroying something else
family trying
I was trying to support a family with writing. I didn't have a private income. I had no other profession.
money seemed sold
I think my first story sold for $550. This was in 1954, and it seemed like quite a lot of money, and I said to myself, 'Hey, I'm a professional writer now.'
bookstores harvard
When I went away to college, I marveled at the wealth of bookstores around Harvard Square.
almost arabic believer call prayer quite
Arabic is very twisting, very beautiful. The call to prayer is quite haunting; it almost makes you a believer on the spot.
carrying majors narrow rocks tiger uphill
Tiger Woods did not always win majors with ease; after his narrow victory in the 1999 PGA, he slumped and sighed as if he'd been carrying rocks uphill all afternoon.