John Updike Zitate auf Englisch

Seite 3

We do survive every moment, after all, except the last one.

John Updike

Existence itself does not feel horrible; it feels like an ecstasy, rather, which we have only to be still to experience.

John Updike

Rain is grace; rain is the sky descending to the earth; without rain, there would be no life.

John Updike

An affair wants to spill, to share its glory with the world. No act is so private it does not seek applause.

John Updike

I seem to have this need to belong to some church. I get worried on Sunday mornings.

John Updike

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.

John Updike

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.

John Updike

I've always tried to write about America. It's very worth a writer's effort.

John Updike

All cartoonists are geniuses, but Arnold Roth is especially so.

John Updike

To guarantee the individual maximum freedom within a social frame of minimal laws ensures - if not happiness - its hopeful pursuit.

John Updike

There's almost nothing worse to live with than a struggling artist.

John Updike

My wife and I had children when we were children ourselves.

John Updike

Religion enables us to ignore nothingness and get on with the jobs of life.

John Updike

Harvard has enough panegyrists without me.

John Updike

The lust to meet authors ranks low, I think, on the roll of holy appetites; but it is an authentic pang.

John Updike

In art, anything goes, and if it goes, it goes.

John Updike

The miracle of turning inklings into thoughts and thoughts into words and words into metal and print and ink never palls for me.

John Updike

New York is, of course, many cities, and an exile does not return to the one he left.

John Updike

It is not an aesthetic misstep to make the viewer aware of the paint and the painter's hand. Such an empathetic awareness lies at the heart of aesthetic appreciation.

John Updike

My first ambition was to be an animator for Walt Disney. Then I wanted to be a magazine cartoonist.

John Updike

There is a great deal of busywork to a writer's life, as to a professor's life, a great deal of work that matters only in that, if you don't do it, your desk becomes very full of papers. So, there is a lot of letter answering and a certain amount of speaking, though I try to keep that at a minimum.

John Updike

I think books should have secrets, like people do.

John Updike

We're past the age of heroes and hero kings... Most of our lives are basically mundane and dull, and it's up to the writer to find ways to make them interesting.

John Updike

I'm a dull person.

John Updike

The first author I met socially was Joyce Cary.

John Updike

In my first 15 or 20 years of authorship, I was almost never asked to give a speech or an interview. The written work was supposed to speak for itself, and to sell itself, sometimes even without the author's photograph on the back flap.

John Updike

Dreams come true; without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them.

John Updike

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.

John Updike

John Barth, I think, was really a writer of my own age and somewhat of my own temperament, although his books are very different from mine, and he has been a spokesman for the very ambitious, long, rather academic novel. But I don't think that what he is saying, so far as I understand it, is so very different from what I'm saying.

John Updike

Young or old, a writer sends a book into the world, not himself.

John Updike

When I was born, my parents and my mother's parents planted a dogwood tree in the side yard of the large white house in which we lived throughout my boyhood. This tree I learned quite early, was exactly my age - was, in a sense, me.

John Updike

In any interview, you do say more or less than you mean.

John Updike

In leaving New York in 1957, I did leave without regret the literary demimonde of agents and would-be's and with-it nonparticipants; this world seemed unnutritious and interfering.

John Updike

I love Shillington not as one loves Capri or New York, because they are special, but as one loves one's own body and consciousness, because they are synonymous with being.

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

Without books, we might just melt into the airwaves and be just another set of blips.

John Updike