John Updike quotes Was an American novelist, poet, short story writer, art critic, and literary critic. Born: 03/18/1932 Died: 01/27/2009 Country: usa

• Sex is like money; only too much is enough. (John Updike) [sex/money]
• Rain is grace; rain is the sky condescending to the earth; without rain, there would be no life. (John Updike) [sky/life]
• Creativity is merely a plus name for regular activity. Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right, or better. (John Updike) [creativity/plus/activity/activity]
• "Writers may be disreputable, incorrigible, early to decay or late to bloom but they dare to go it alone. (John Updike) [bloom]
• Art is like baby shoes. When you coat them with gold, they can no longer be worn. (John Updike) [art/gold]
• There is this quality in things, of the Right was seeming Wrong at first. To test our faith. (John Updike) [quality/right/faith]
• What more fiendish proof of cosmic irresponsibility than a Nature which, having invented sex as a way to mix genes, then permits to arise, amid all its perfumed and hypnotic inducements to mate, a tireless tribe of spirochetes and viruses that torture and kill us for following orders? (John Updike) [more/nature/sex]
• What art offers is space - a certain breathing room for the spirit. (John Updike) [art/spirit]
• I would especially like to recourt the Muse of poetry, who ran off with the mailman four years ago, and drops me only a scribbled postcard from time to time. (John Updike) [poetry/time/time]
• The creative writer uses his life as well as being its victim; he can control, in his work, the self-presentation that in actuality is at the mercy of a thousand accidents. (John Updike) [life/being/control/mercy]
• 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. (John Updike) [marriage/start]
• The Founding Fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called an education. (John Updike) [wisdom/parents/education]
• Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea. (John Updike) [poetry]
• Perfectionism is the enemy of creation, as extreme self-solitude is the enemy of well-being. (John Updike) [creation]
• Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right, or doing it better. (John Updike) [activity/right]
• Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea. (John Updike) [poetry]
• 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. (John Updike) [evening/news/books]
• Dreams come true; without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them. (John Updike) [dreams/nature]
• If men do not keep on speaking terms with children, they cease to be men, and become merely machines for eating and for earning money. (John Updike) [men/men/money]
• Customs and convictions change; respectable people are the last to know, or to admit, the change, and the ones most offended by fresh reflections of the facts in the mirror of art. (John Updike) [customs/change/people/change]
• Bankruptcy is a sacred state, a condition beyond conditions, as theologians might say, and attempts to investigate it are necessarily obscene, like spiritualism. One knows only that he has passed into it and lives beyond us, in a condition not ours. (John Updike) [state/condition/condition]
• I would rather have as my patron a host of anonymous citizens digging into their own pockets for the price of a book or a magazine than a small body of enlightened and responsible men administering public funds. I would rather chance my personal vision of truth striking home here and there in the chaos of publication that exists than attempt to filter it through a few sets of official, honorably public-spirited scruples. (John Updike) [anonymous/price/soul & body/men]
• Government is either organized benevolence or organized madness; its peculiar magnitude permits no shading. (John Updike) [government]
• I love my government not least for the extent to which it leaves me alone. (John Updike) [love/government]
• Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face. As soon as one is aware of being somebody, to be watched and listened to with extra interest, input ceases, and the performer goes blind and deaf in his over-animation. One can either see or be seen. (John Updike) [celebrity/face/being/]
• Facts are generally overesteemed. For most practical purposes, a thing is what men think it is. When they judged the earth flat, it was flat. As long as men thought slavery tolerable, tolerable it was. We live down here among shadows, shadows among shadows. (John Updike) [facts/thing/men/think]
• The guarantee that our self enjoys an intended relation to the outer world is most, if not all, we ask from religion. God is the self projected onto reality by our natural and necessary optimism. He is the not-me personified. (John Updike) [religion/god/reality]
• The essential self is innocent, and when it tastes its own innocence knows that it lives for ever. (John Updike)
• 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. (John Updike) [faith/reality/conscience/memory]
• An affair wants to spill, to share its glory with the world. No act is so private it does not seek applause. (John Updike) [share/applause]
• Americans have been conditioned to respect newness, whatever it cost them. (John Updike) [respect]

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