A photograph presents itself not only as a visual representation, but as evidence, more convincing than a painting because of the unimpeachable mechanical means whereby it was made. We do not trust the artist's flattering hand; but we do trust film, and shadows, and light.
John UpdikeA 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 UpdikeYou cannot help but learn more as take the world into your hands. Take it up reverently, for it is and old piece of clay, with millions of thumbprints on it.
John UpdikeHoping to fashion a mirror, the lover doth polish the face of his beloved until he produces a skull.
John UpdikeThe Florida sun seems not much a single thing overhead but a set of klieg lights that pursue you everywhere with an even white illumination.
John UpdikeAmerican art in general... takes to surreal exaggerations and metaphors; but its Puritan work ethic has little use for the playful self-indulgence behind Parisian Surrealism.
John UpdikeFiction is nothing less than the subtlest instrument for self-examination and self-display that Mankind has invented yet.
John UpdikeFrom the standpoint of a Middle Eastern citizen, Americans look like a bully forcing our way of life on the Islamic way of life. The notion of purity is very important in Islam, and a lot of the negative warlike actions taken against us have to do with our physical presence in the Middle East. Osama bin Laden was trying to get the American, or protesting the American military presence in Saudi Arabia. It's not surprising that our strong presence in Iraq has produced a wave of resistance anger, extreme anger in some cases, and a permissive atmosphere that allows these people to go undetected.
John UpdikeBaseball is meant to be fun, and not all the solemn money-men in fur-collared greatcoats, not all the scruffy media cameramen and sour-faced reporters that crowd around the dugouts can quite smother the exhilarating spaciousness and grace of this impudently relaxed sport, a game of innumerable potential redemptions and curious disappointments.
John Updike...but with his mother there's no question of liking him they're not even in a way separate people he began in her stomach and if she gave him life she can take it away and if he feels that withdrawal it will be the grave itself.
John UpdikeI'm somewhat shy about the brutal facts of being a carnivore. I don't like meat to look like animals. I prefer it in the form of sausages, hamburger and meat loaf, far removed from the living thing.
John Updike...as all souls are equal before their Maker, a two inch putt counts the same as a 250 yard drive. There is a comedy in this and a certain unfairness even, which makes golf an even apter mirror of reality.
John UpdikeSmaller than a breadbox, bigger than a TV remote, the average book fits into the human hand with a seductive nestling, a kiss of texture, whether of cover cloth, glazed jacket, or flexible paperback.
John UpdikeWe are fated to love one another; we hardly exist outside our love, we are just animals without it, with a birth and a death and constant fear between. Our love has lifted us up , out of the dreadfulness of merely living.
John UpdikeIt's been the same story ever since I can remember, ever since Wilson - the Republicans don't do a thing for the little man.
John UpdikeBasically it's true that my own life has been my chief window for life in America, beginning with my childhood and the conflicts, the struggles, the strains that I felt in my own family.
John UpdikeMy father provided; he gathered things to himself and let them fall upon the world; my clothes, my food, my luxurious hopes had fallen to me from him, and for the first time his death seemed, even at its immense stellar remove of impossibility, a grave and dreadful threat.
John UpdikeNot judginess, but openness and curiosity are our proper business. I'm still trying to educate myself. I don't think you need to keep rehearsing your instincts. Far better to seek out models of what you can't do.
John UpdikeSeemed to me important in writing about people to be able to describe the sexual transactions between them. It's - for many people it's the height of, what they see, of ecstasy and poetry is in their sexual encounters. And furthermore, personality - human personality does not end in the bedroom, but persists.
John UpdikeIt is easy to love people in memory; the hard thing is to love them when they are there in front of you.
John UpdikeGolf camaraderie, like that of astronauts and Antarctic explorers, is based on a common experience of transcendence; fat or thin, scratch or duffer, we have been somerwhere together where non-golfers never go.
John UpdikeThe 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 UpdikeProfessionalism in art has this difficulty: To be professional is to be dependable, to be dependable is to be predictable, and predictability is esthetically boring - an anti-virtue in a field where we hope to be astonished and startled and at some deep level refreshed.
John UpdikeAn American in London...cannot but be impressed and charmed by the city. The momumentality of Washington, the thriving business of New York, the antique intimacy of Boston, plus a certain spacious and open feeling reminiscent of Denver and San Francisco-all these he finds combined for his pleasure.
John UpdikeI still believe in the American Dream. I see it in terms of freedom, and a government that trusts its people to exercise freedom, that this is not a government that allows you to give, that allows you to explore, and doesn't dampen your own creativity - in the broadest sense - with a lot of dictums or dogmas or restraints. So, insofar as we can remain a free country that allows for the interplay of personal energies. I think this is still a country that is not only working towards a dream, but actually is the dream in action.
John UpdikeHope bases vast premises on foolish accidents, and reads a word where in fact only a scribble exists.
John UpdikeCustoms 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 UpdikeDays, pale slices between nights, they blend, not exactly alike, transparencies so lightly tinted that only stacked all together do they darken to a fatal shade.
John UpdikeI think it's the sentence-to-sentence pleasures, the little surprises of a surprising style of an acute style, and also the way things happen one after the other, that makes a book interesting to read page to page
John Updike