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
wall writing doors
A narrative is like a room on whose walls a number of false doors have been painted; while within the narrative, we have many apparent choices of exit, but when the author leads us to one particular door, we know it is the right one because it opens.
mother people way
...but with his mother there's no question of liking him they're not even in a way separate people he began in her stomach and if she gave him life she can take it away and if he feels that withdrawal it will be the grave itself.
past shining darkness
What is the past, after all, but a vast sheet of darkness in which a few moments, pricked apparently at random, shine?
lying mean curves
A woman’s beauty lies, not in any exaggeration of the specialized zones, nor in any general harmony that could be worked out by means of the sectio aurea or a similar aesthetic superstition; but in the arabesque of the spine. The curve by which the back modulates into the buttocks. It is here that grace sits and rides a woman’s body.
rotting too-much dandelions
So much love, too much love, it is our madness, it is rotting us out, exploding us like dandelion polls.
easter boston eggs
Fenway Park, in Boston, is a lyric little bandbox of a ballpark. Everything is painted green and seems in curiously sharp focus, like the inside of an old-fashioned peeping-type Easter egg.
hate hatred shelter
...hate suits him better than forgiveness. Immersed in hate, he doesn't have to do anything; he can be paralyzed, and the rigidty of hatred makes a kind of shelter for him.
breakup caring trouble
That's the trouble with caring about anybody, you begin to feel overprotective. Then you begin to feel crowded.
coffee eye men
…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?
dark hands two
But it is just two lovers, holding hands and in a hurry to reach their car, their locked hands a starfish leaping through the dark.
children thinking race
Having children is something we think we ought to do because our parents did it, but when it is over the children are just other members of the human race, rather disappointingly.
born burned right-time
If she’d been born at the right time they would have burned her over in Salem.
fighting hunting fire
Women, fire in their crotch, won't burn out, begin by fighting off pricks, end by going wild hunting for one that still works.
photography art tools
Photography is the first art wherein the tool does most of the work.