John Updike Zitate auf Englisch

Seite 2

I was trying to support a family with writing. I didn't have a private income. I had no other profession.

John Updike

My reading as a child was lazy and cowardly, and it is yet. I was afraid of encountering, in a book, something I didn't want to know.

John Updike

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

John Updike

From infancy on, we are all spies; the shame is not this but that the secrets to be discovered are so paltry and few.

John Updike

I should mention something that nobody ever thinks about, but proofreading takes a lot of time. After you write something, there are these proofs that keep coming, and there's this panicky feeling that 'This is me and I must make it better.'

John Updike

Sometimes it seems the whole purpose of pets is to bring death into the house.

John Updike

We take our bearings, daily, from others. To be sane is, to a great extent, to be sociable.

John Updike

The inner spaces that a good story lets us enter are the old apartments of religion.

John Updike

Government is either organized benevolence or organized madness; its peculiar magnitude permits no shading.

John Updike

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

John Updike

I would write ads for deodorants or labels for catsup bottles if I had to.

John Updike

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.

John Updike

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

John Updike

Until the 20th century it was generally assumed that a writer had said what he had to say in his works.

John Updike

All love comes from the family.

John Updike

Thinking it over, I can't locate another artist in the Updike family.

John Updike

Writers may be disreputable, incorrigible, early to decay or late to bloom but they dare to go it alone.

John Updike

To be President of the United States, sir, is to act as advocate for a blind, venomous, and ungrateful client.

John Updike

My complaint, as an exile who once loved New York and who likes to return a half-dozen times a year, is not that it plays host to extremes of the human condition: There is grandeur in that, and necessity.

John Updike

America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy.

John Updike

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

John Updike

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.

John Updike

Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right or better.

John Updike

Bookstores are lonely forts, spilling light onto the sidewalk. They civilize their neighborhoods.

John Updike

Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.

John Updike

Sex is like money; only too much is enough.

John Updike

A seventeenth-century house can be recognized by its steep roof, massive central chimney and utter porchlessness. Some of those houses have a second-story overhang, emphasizing their medieval look.

John Updike

Now that I am sixty, I see why the idea of elder wisdom has passed from currency.

John Updike

Inspiration arrives as a packet of material to be delivered.

John Updike

Arabic is very twisting, very beautiful. The call to prayer is quite haunting; it almost makes you a believer on the spot.

John Updike

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.

John Updike

I have never liked haircuts.

John Updike

Fiction is burdened for me with a sense of duty.

John Updike

I like short stories.

John Updike

Americans have been conditioned to respect newness, whatever it costs them.

John Updike

Billy Collins writes lovely poems. Limpid, gently and consistently startling, more serious than they seem, they describe all the worlds that are and were and some others besides.

John Updike