John Updike Quotes - Page 8

Being on TV is like being alive, only more so.

Of plants tomatoes seemed the most human, eager and fragile and prone to rot.

Everybody who tells you how to act has whiskey on their breath.

Women, fire in their crotch, won't burn out, begin by fighting off pricks, end by going wild hunting for one that still works.

Life, just as we first thought, is playing grownup.

The United States, democratic and various though it is, is not an easy country for a fiction-writer to enter: the slot between the fantastic and the drab seems too narrow.

Within your own generation-the same songs, the same wars, the same attitudes toward those wars, the same rules and radio shows in the air-you can gauge the possibilities and impossibilities. With a person of another generation, you are treading water, playing with fire.

Love makes the air light.

I can't bear to finish things, beyond a certain point they get heavy. There's something so dead about a finished painting.

Why does life feel, to us as we experience it, so desperately urgent and so utterly pointless at the same time?

You imagine a reader and try to keep the reader interested. That's storytelling. You also hope to reward the reader with a sense of a completed design, that somebody is in charge, and that while life is pointless, the book isn't pointless. The author knows where he is going. That's form.

Our tears fatten upon our memories of joy.

I still believe in the American Dream. I see it in terms of freedom, and a government that trusts its people to exercise freedom, that this is not a government that allows you to give, that allows you to explore, and doesn't dampen your own creativity - in the broadest sense - with a lot of dictums or dogmas or restraints. So, insofar as we can remain a free country that allows for the interplay of personal energies. I think this is still a country that is not only working towards a dream, but actually is the dream in action.

Basically it's true that my own life has been my chief window for life in America, beginning with my childhood and the conflicts, the struggles, the strains that I felt in my own family.

All blessings are mixed blessings.

Being a famous writer is a little like being a tall dwarf. You're on the edge of normality.

Without rain, there would be no life.

Art imitates Nature in this; not to dare is to dwindle.

History. The more of it you have the more you have to live it. After a little while there gets to be too much of it to memorize and maybe that's when empires start to decline.

My only duty was to describe reality as it had come to me-to give the mundane its beautiful due.

Hope bases vast premises on foolish accidents, and reads a word where in fact only a scribble exists.

One of the cool, chaste countries - Canada or Sweden.

Americans have been conditioned to respect newness, whatever it costs them.

An affair wants to spill, to share its glory with the world. No act is so private it does not seek applause.

Hoping to fashion a mirror, the lover doth polish the face of his beloved until he produces a skull.