John Updike Quotes

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John Updike

Profession : Novelist

Birth : March 18, 1932

In a city like New York, you're aware of the rich and poor.

John Updike

The rich - they just live in another realm, really.

John Updike

It's sort of good to see your vocation as a daily task and have fairly modest expectations for financial or reward in other coin - glory, love, whatever.

John Updike

A Christian novelist tries to describe the world as it is.

John Updike

For a long time, I was under the impression that 'Terry and the Pirates' was the best comic strip in the United States.

John Updike

I see no intrinsic reason why a doubly talented artist might not arise and create a comic-strip novel masterpiece.

John Updike

For whatever crispness and animation my writing has I give some credit to the cartoonist manque.

John Updike

Authors should be honored only for their works.

John Updike

The study of literature threatens to become a kind of paleontology of failure, and criticism a supercilious psychoanalysis of authors.

John Updike

Somehow, it is hard to dislike a man once you have played a round of golf with him.

John Updike

Golf's ultimate moral instruction directs us to find within ourselves a pivotal center of enjoyment: relax into a rhythm that fits the hills and swales, and play the shot at hand - not the last one, or the next one, but the one at your feet, in the poison ivy, where you put it.

John Updike

My golf is so delicate, so tenuously wired together with silent inward prayers, exhortations and unstable visualizations, that the sheer pressure of an additional pair of eyes crumbles the whole rickety structure into rubble.

John Updike

By the mid-17th century, telescopes had improved enough to make visible the seasonally growing and shrinking polar ice caps on Mars, and features such as Syrtis Major, a dark patch thought to be a shallow sea.

John Updike

The substance of fictional architecture is not bricks and mortar but evanescent consciousness.

John Updike

A house, having been willfully purchased and furnished, tells us more than a body, and its description is a foremost resource of the art of fiction.

John Updike

I'm a dull person.

John Updike

Tiger Woods did not always win majors with ease; after his narrow victory in the 1999 PGA, he slumped and sighed as if he'd been carrying rocks uphill all afternoon.

John Updike

Baseball skills schizophrenically encompass a pitcher's, a batter's and a fielder's.

John Updike

Golf at its measured pace permits an electric excess of mental activity.

John Updike

When I went away to college, I marveled at the wealth of bookstores around Harvard Square.

John Updike