John Updike Zitate – Sprüche auf Englisch mit Übersetzung

Zitat des Tages von John Updike:

I think books should have secrets, like people do.

Every marriage tends to consist of an aristocrat and a peasant. Of a teacher and a learner.

John Updike

Writing makes you more human.

John Updike

We are drawn to artists who tell us that art is difficult to do and takes a spiritual effort, because we are still puritan enough to respect a strenuous spiritual effort.

John Updike

Truth should not be forced; it should simply manifest itself, like a woman who has in her privacy reflected and coolly decided to bestow herself upon a certain man.

John Updike

The first breath of adultery is the freest; after it, constraints aping marriage develop.

John Updike

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.

John Updike

In becoming an icon, it is useful to die young.

John Updike

The Internet doesn't like you to learn too much about explosives.

John Updike

The cinema has done more for my spiritual life than the church. My ideas of fame, success and beauty all originate from the big screen. Whereas Christian religion is retreating everywhere and losing more and more influence; film has filled the vacuum and supports us with myths and action-controlling images.

John Updike

For male and female alike, the bodies of the other sex are messages signaling what we must do, they are glowing signifiers of our own necessities.

John Updike

The dwelling places of Europe have an air of inheritance, or cumulative possession - a hive occupied by generations of bees.

John Updike

I know more about what it's like to be elderly and infirm and kind of stupid, the way you get forgetful, but on the other hand I'm a littler, wiser, dare we say? The word 'wisdom' has kind of faded out of our vocabulary, but yeah, I'm a little wiser.

John Updike

My actinic keratosis is a result of the triumphalism of the beach. The sun exacerbates it.

John Updike

By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.

John Updike

Customs and convictions change; respectable people are the last to know, or to admit, the change, and the ones most offended by fresh reflections of the facts in the mirror of art.

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

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.

John Updike

I love my government not least for the extent to which it leaves me alone.

John Updike

We don't really want to think that the artist is only very skilled, that he has merely devoted his life to perfecting a certain set of intelligible skills.

John Updike

If men do not keep on speaking terms with children, they cease to be men, and become merely machines for eating and for earning money.

John Updike

Some golfers, we are told, enjoy the landscape; but properly, the landscape shrivels and compresses into the grim, surrealistically vivid patch of grass directly under the golfer's eyes as he morosely walks toward where he thinks his ball might be.

John Updike

A healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people's patience.

John Updike

Art is like baby shoes. When you coat them with gold, they can no longer be worn.

John Updike

Reminiscence and self-parody are part of remaining true to oneself.

John Updike

There is no pleasing New Englanders, my dear, their soil is all rocks and their hearts are bloodless absolutes.

John Updike

I picked up 'On Moral Fiction' in the bookstore and looked up myself in the index, but I didn't read it through. I try not to read things that depress me.

John Updike

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.

John Updike

Most of American life consists of driving somewhere and then returning home, wondering why the hell you went.

John Updike

The essential support and encouragement comes from within, arising out of the mad notion that your society needs to know what only you can tell it.

John Updike

Our artistic heroes tend to be those self-exercisers, like Picasso, and Nabokov, and Wallace Stevens, who rather defiantly kept playing past dark.

John Updike

The essential self is innocent, and when it tastes its own innocence knows that it lives for ever.

John Updike

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.

John Updike

I didn't need to write historical epics, no, or science fiction, though I read a lot of science fiction as a kid and rather liked it. But I didn't have the mentality.

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

Perhaps I have written fiction because everything unambiguously expressed seems somehow crass to me; and when the subject is myself, I want to jeer and weep.

John Updike

What art offers is space - a certain breathing room for the spirit.

John Updike