John Updike Quotes - Page 5

What is the past, after all, but a vast sheet of darkness in which a few moments, pricked apparently at random, shine?

You can never get the smell of smoke out. Like the smell of failure in life.

The literary scene is a kind of Medusa’s raft, small and sinking, and one’s instinct when a newcomer tries to clamber aboard is to step on his fingers.

The refusal to rest content, the willingness to risk excess on behalf of one's obsessions, is what distinguishes artists from entertainers, and what makes some artists adventurers on behalf of us all.

God is in the tiger as well as in the lamb.

One of the nice things about having a lover, it makes you think about everything anew. The rest of your life becomes a kind of movie, flat and even rather funny.

By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.

I imagine most of that stuff on the information highway is roadkill anyway.

Now that I am sixty, I see why the idea of elder wisdom has passed from currency.

In the vacuum of the heart love falls forever.

Four years was enough of Harvard. I still had a lot to learn, but had been given the liberating notion that now I could teach myself.

We all begin life as parasites within the mother, and writers begin their existence imitatively, within the body of letters.

There is the fear that you somehow neglected to say what was really yours to say.

Appealingness is inversely proportional to attainability.

Life is a video game. No matter how good you get, you are always zapped in the end.

Writing doesn't require drive. It's like saying a chicken has to have drive to lay an egg.

We're past the age of heroes and hero kings. ... Most of our lives are basically mundane and dull, and it's up to the writer to find ways to make them interesting.

Life is a nacho. It can be yummy-crunchy or squishy-yucky. It just depends on how long it takes for you to start eating it.

The breezes taste Of apple peel. The air is full Of smells to feel- Ripe fruit, old footballs, Burning brush, New books, erasers, Chalk, and such. The bee, his hive, Well-honeyed hum, And Mother cuts Chrysanthemums. Like plates washed clean With suds, the days Are polished with A morning haze.

Literature gives us models of living human beings who may not agree with us and even be our enemies. D. H. Lawrence said that the purpose of literature was to expand our sympathies. 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. And this conflict cannot be easily reconciled. The tension is always there as a kind of a pain in the human condition.

In memory's telephoto lens, far objects are magnified.

I really don't want to encourage young writers. Keep them down and out and silent is my motto.

I never made a decision in my life that wasn't one hundred per cent selfish.

Let us not mock God with metaphor, Analogy, sidestepping, transcendence; Making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the Faded credulity of earlier ages: Let us walk through the door.

There was a beauty here bigger than the hurtling beauty of basketball, a beauty refined from country pastures, a game of solitariness, of waiting, waiting for the pitcher to complete his gaze toward first base and throw his lightning, a game whose very taste, of spit and dust and grass and sweat and leather and sun, was America.