John Updike Quotes - Page 7

Natural beauty is essentially temporary and sad, hence the impression of obscene mockery which artificial flowers give us.

The difficulty is, all swing thoughts decay, like radium. What burnt up the course on Wednesday has turned to lead on Sunday. Yet it does not do to have a blank mind: the terrible hugeness of the course will rush into the vacuum and the ball will spray like a thing berserk.

Revolution is just one crowd taking power from another.

Government money in the arts, I fear, can only deflect artists from their responsibility to find an authentic market for their products.

Government is either organized benevolence or organized madness; its peculiar magnitude permits no shading.

I secretly understood: the primitive appeal of the hearth. Television is - its irresistible charm - a fire.

Vagueness and procrastination are ever a comfort to the frail in spirit.

There is this quality, in things, of the right way seeming wrong at first.

…he is unlike the other customers. They sense it too, and look at him with hard eyes, eyes like little metal studs pinned into the white faces of young men [...] In the hush his entrance creates, the excessive courtesy the weary woman behind the counter shows him amplifies his strangeness. He orders coffee quietly and studies the rim of the cup to steady the sliding in his stomach. He had thought, he had read, that from shore to shore all America was the same. He wonders, Is it just these people I’m outside or is it all America?

That's the trouble with caring about anybody, you begin to feel overprotective. Then you begin to feel crowded.

Adversity in immunological doses has its uses; more than that crushes.

You cannot help but learn more as take the world into your hands. Take it up reverently, for it is and old piece of clay, with millions of thumbprints on it.

It skims in through the eye, and by means of the utterly delicate retina hurls shadows like insect legs inward for translation. Then an immense space opens up in silence and an endlessly fecund sub-universe the writer descends, and asks the reader to descend after him, not merely to gain instructions but also to experience delight, the delight of mind freed from matter and exultant in the strength it has stolen from matter.

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...'

One does not go to Moscow to get fat.

Pressed, I would define spirituality as the shadow of light humanity casts as it moves through the darkness of everything that can be explained.

How can the planet keep turning and turning and not get so bored it explodes?

You write because you don't talk very well, and maybe one of the reasons that I was determined to write was that I wasn't an orator, unlike my mother and my grandfather, who both spoke beautifully and spoke all the time. Maybe I grew up with too many voices around me, as a matter of fact.

Fiction is in danger of becoming a kind of poetry. Only other poets read it. Only other fiction writers care about it.

In a democracy in the 20th and 21st century, if you can't base your fiction upon ordinary people and the issues that engage them, then you are reduced to writing about spectacular unreal people. You know, James Bond or something, and you cook up adventures.

The physicists are getting down to the nitty-gritty, they've really just about pared things down to the ultimate details, and the last thing they ever expected to happen is happening. God is showing through.

Faith is not so much a binary pole as a quantum state, which tends to indeterminacy when closely examined.

The - writing is a kind of act of aggression, and a person who is not aggressive in his normal, may I say, intercourse with humanity might well be an aggressive writer.

Critics are like pigs at the pastry cart.

If you look at the best-seller list, it is mostly thrillers. Very few books attempt to create an image of the life we live. I knew there were writers who wore tweed coats and lived in Connecticut and somehow made a living, and that's what I aimed to do. I've tried to write as well as I can with books that say something to any reader.