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
selfish decision made
I never made a decision in my life that wasn't one hundred per cent selfish.
running animal cracks
Those running tights the young women wear now, so they look like spacewomen, raspberry red and electric green so tight they show every muscle right into the crack between the buttocks, what is the point of them? Display. Young animals need to display.
loyalty failure men
All men are mortal, and therefore all men are losers; our profoundest loyalty goes out to the failed.
song attitude war
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.
mother body letters
We all begin life as parasites within the mother, and writers begin their existence imitatively, within the body of letters.
life years self
As I get older, my childhood self becomes more accessible to me, but selectively, in images as stylized and suspect as moments remembered from a novel read years ago.
movie views imagine
Movies are, like sharp sunlight, merciless; we do not imagine, we view.
light self doe
The New England spirit does not seek solutions in a crowd; raw light and solitariness are less dreaded than welcomed as enhancers of our essential selves.
architecture sometimes good-and-bad
I am sometimes visited by the heretical thought that there is no such thing as good and bad architecture, any more than there is good and bad nature. It is all in where you stand at the time.
sex health order
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?
feelings made feels
I was made to feel I could do things. If you get this feeling early and can hold it until you're 15, you tend to never lose it.
enemy senses
It's great to have an enemy. Sharpens your senses.
winning years white
Green grass, green grandstands, green concession stalls, green paper cups, green folding chairs and visors for sale, green and white ropes, green-topped Georgia pines. If justice were poetic, Hubert Green would win it every year.
struggle editors class
Writers take words seriously-perha ps the last professional class that does-and they struggle to steer their own through the crosswinds of meddling editors and careless typesetters and obtuse and malevolent reviewers into the lap of the ideal reader.