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
new-york trying bottles
Hemingway describes literary New York as a bottle full of tapeworms trying to feed on each other.
baby heaven soul
As souls must cry when they awaken in tiny babies and find themselves far from heaven
beautiful reality giving
My only duty was to describe reality as it had come to me-to give the mundane its beautiful due.
song lacking
Of nothing but me I sing, lacking another song.
beautiful moving math
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...'
food tomatoes plant
Of plants tomatoes seemed the most human, eager and fragile and prone to rot.
cutting boys hair
The scissors cut the long-grown hair; The razor scrapes the remnant fuzz. Small-jawed, weak-chinned, big-eyed, I stare At the forgotten boy I was.
spring flower farewell
It’s spring! Farewell To chills and colds! The blushing, girlish World unfolds Each flower, leaf And blade of sod— Small letters sent To her from God.
new-york cities return
New York is of course many cities, and an exile does not return to the one he left.
memories believe reality
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.
america ungrateful president
To be President of the United States, sir, is to act as advocate for a blind, venomous, and ungrateful client.
cds play giving
Students present themselves...like a succession of CDs whose shimmering surface gives no clue to their contents without the equipment to play them.
art exercise men
Whatever art offered the men and women of previous eras, what it offers our own, it seems to me, is space - a certain breathing room for the spirit. The town I grew up in had many vacant lots; when I go back now, the vacant lots are gone. They were a luxury, just as tigers and rhinoceri, in the crowded world that is making, are luxuries. Museums and bookstores should feel, I think, like vacant lots - places where the demands on us are our own demands, where the spirit can find exercise in unsupervised play.
exercise thinking play
Museums and bookstores should feel, I think, like vacant lots - places where the demands on us are our own demands, where the spirit can find exercise in unsupervised play.