|
John Updike
John Updike (born 18 March 1932) American novelist and short story author
Sourced
- I miss only, and then only a little, in the late afternoon, the sudden white laughter that like heat lightning bursts in an atmosphere where souls are trying to serve the impossible. My father for all his mourning moved in the atmosphere of such laughter. He would have puzzled you. He puzzled me. His upper half was hidden from me, I knew best his legs.
- Zeus had loved his old friend, and lifted him up, and set him among the stars as the constellation Sagittarius. Here, in the Zodiac, now above, now below the horizon, he assists in the regulation of our destinies, though in this latter time few living mortals cast their eyes respectfully toward Heaven, and fewer still sit as students to the stars.
- I must go to Nature disarmed of perspective and stretch myself like a large transparent canvas upon her in the hope that, my submission being perfect, the imprint of a beautiful and useful truth would be taken.
- A healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people's patience.
- Suspect each moment, for it is a thief, tiptoeing away with more than it brings.
- A Month of Sundays (1975)
- America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy.
- Problems and Other Stories (1979)
- Vagueness and procrastination are ever a comfort to the frail in spirit.
- In the Beauty of the Lilies (1996)
Salon.com Interview (2000)
- It was true of my generation, that the movies were terribly vivid and instructive. There were all kinds of things you learned. Like the 19th century novels, you saw how other social classes lived— especially the upper classes. So in a funny way, they taught you manners almost. But also moral manners. The gallantry of a Gary Cooper or an Errol Flynn or Jimmy Stewart. It was ethical instruction of a sort that the church purported to be giving you, but in a much less digestible form. Instead of these remote, crabbed biblical verses, you had contemporary people acting out moral dilemmas. Just the grace, the grace of those stars— not just the dancing stars, but the way they all moved with a certain grace. All that sank deep into my head, and my soul.
- In the old movies, yes, there always was the happy ending and order was restored. As it is in Shakespeare's plays. It's no disgrace to, in the end, restore order. And punish the wicked and, in some way, reward the righteous.
- When I was a boy, the bestselling books were often the books that were on your piano teacher's shelf. I mean, Steinbeck, Hemingway, some Faulkner. Faulkner actually had, considering how hard he is to read and how drastic the experiments are, quite a middle-class readership. But certainly someone like Steinbeck was a bestseller as well as a Nobel Prize-winning author of high intent. You don't feel that now. I don't feel that we have the merger of serious and pop— it's gone, dissolving. Tastes have coarsened. People read less, they're less comfortable with the written word.
- An author that's in now might be out in ten years. And vice-versa. Who knows when the final sifting is done, in the year 2050, say, who will be read of my generation? You'd like to think you will be one. But there has to be a constant weeding that goes on. The Victorians read all kinds of writers who we don't have time for now. Who reads Thackeray? An educated person reads Dickens, or reads some Dickens. But Thackeray?
Attributed
- A leader is one who, out of madness or goodness, volunteers to take upon himself the woe of the people. There are few men so foolish, hence the erratic quality of leadership in the world.
- 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.
- Americans have been conditioned to respect newness, whatever it costs them.
- Among the repulsions of atheism for me has been its drastic uninterestingness as an intellectual position. Where was the ingenuity, the ambiguity, the humanity of saying that the universe just happened to happen and that when we're dead we're dead?
- Art is like baby shoes. When you coat them with gold, they can no longer be worn.
- But for a few phrases from his letters and an odd line or two of his verse, the poet walks gagged through his own biography.
- Creativity is merely a plus name for regular activity. Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right, or better.
- Variant: Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right, or doing it better.
- Dreams come true; without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them.
- Variant: Dreams come true. Without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them.
- Each morning my characters greet me with misty faces willing, though chilled, to muster for another day's progress through the dazzling quicksand the marsh of blank paper.
- Existence itself does not feel horrible; it feels like an ecstasy, rather, which we have only to be still to experience.
- Four years was enough of Harvard. I still had a lot to learn, but had been given the liberating notion that now I could teach myself.
- From infancy on, we are all spies; the shame is not this but that the secrets to be discovered are so paltry and few.
- Golf appeals to the idiot in us and the child. Just how childlike golf players become is proven by their frequent inability to count past five.
- He had a sensation of anxiety and shame, a sensitivity acute beyond usefulness, as if the nervous system, flayed of its old hide of social usage, must record every touch of pain.
- He skates saucily over great tracts of confessed ignorance.
- Her sentences march under a harsh sun that bleaches color from them but bestows a peculiar, invigorating, Pascalian clarity.
- How do you write women so well? I think of a man and I take away reason and accountability.
- I moved to New England partly because it has a real literary past. The ghosts of Hawthorne and Melville still sit on those green hills. The worship of Mammon is also somewhat lessened there by the spirit of irony. I don't get hay fever in New England either.
- I secretly understood: the primitive appeal of the hearth. Television is— its irresistible charm— a fire.
- I think taste is a social concept and not an artistic one. I'm willing to show good taste, if I can, in somebody else's living room, but our reading life is too short for a writer to be in any way polite. Since his words enter into another's brain in silence and intimacy, he should be as honest and explicit as we are with ourselves.
- I would especially like to recourt the Muse of poetry, who ran off with the mailman four years ago, and drops me only a scribbled postcard from time to time.
- I would rather have as my patron a host of anonymous citizens digging into their own pockets for the price of a book or a magazine than a small body of enlightened and responsible men administering public funds. I would rather chance my personal vision of truth striking home here and there in the chaos of publication that exists than attempt to filter it through a few sets of official, honorably public-spirited scruples.
- Inspiration arrives as a packet of material to be delivered.
- Life is a nacho. It can be yummy-crunchy or squishy-yucky. It just depends on how long it takes for you to start eating it.
- Life is a razor, you are always in hot water or a scrape.
- Life is a roller coaster, you have your ups and downs unless you fall off.
- Life is a video game. No matter how good you get, you are always zapped in the end.
- Life is like an overlong drama through which we sit being nagged by the vague memories of having read the reviews.
- Men emerge pale from the little printing plant at four sharp, ghosts for an instant, blinking, until the outdoor light overcomes the look of constant indoor light clinging to them.
- Most of American life consists of driving somewhere and then returning home, wondering why the hell you went.
- Natural beauty is essentially temporary and sad; hence the impression of obscene mockery which artificial flowers give us
- Perfectionism is the enemy of creation, as extreme self-solicitude is the enemy of well-being.
- Possession diminishes perception of value, immediately.
- Rain is grace; rain is the sky condescending to the earth; without rain, there would be no life.
- Sex is like money; only too much is enough.
- Swallow a toad in the morning and you will encounter nothing more disgusting the rest of the day.
- That a marriage ends is less than ideal; but all things end under heaven, and if temporality is held to be invalidating, then nothing real succeeds.
- The creative writer uses his life as well as being its victim; he can control, in his work, the self-presentation that in actuality is at the mercy of a thousand accidents.
- The crooked little tomato branches, pulpy and pale as if made of cheap green paper, broke under the weight of so much fruit; there was something frantic in such fertility, a crying-out like that of children frantic to please.
- The ending is where the reader discovers whether he has been reading the same story the writer thought he was writing.
- The Founding Fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called an education.
- The inner spaces that a good story lets us enter are the old apartments of religion.
- The refusal to rest content, the willingness to risk excess on behalf of one's obsessions, is what distinguishes artists from entertainers, and what makes some artists adventurers on behalf of us all.
- The stripped and shapely Maple grieves The ghosts of her Departed leaves. The ground is hard, As hard as stone. The year is old, The birds are flown.
- There's a crystallization that goes on in a poem which the young man can bring off, but which the middle-aged man can't.
- Until the 20th century it was generally assumed that a writer had said what he had to say in his works.
- We are most alive when we're in love.
- We do survive every moment, after all, except the last one.
- We hope the "real" person behind the words will be revealed as ignominiously as a shapeless snail without its shapely shell.
- We take our bearings, daily, from others. To be sane is, to a great extent, to be sociable.
- What art offers is space— a certain breathing room for the spirit.
- When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas.
- Writers may be disreputable, incorrigible, early to decay or late to bloom but they dare to go it alone.
- Writers take words seriously-perhaps 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.
- Writing and rewriting are a constant search for what it is one is saying.
Quotes of others about Updike
- John Updike's genius is best excited by the lyric possibilities of tragic events that, failing to justify themselves as tragedy, turn unaccountably into comedies. ~ Joyce Carol Oates
External links
|
|
