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John Updike Quotes


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Quotes by John Updike

Showing 121-130 of 198 Quotes by 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

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Fiction is burdened for me with a sense of duty.

~John Updike

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For many years, I read mystery novels for relaxation. But my tastes were too narrow - and, having read all of Agatha Christie and John Dickson Carr, I discovered that the implausibility and the thinness of the people distracted me unduly from the plot.

~John Updike

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

~John Updike

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The first author I met socially was Joyce Cary.

~John Updike

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A room containing Philip Roth, I have noticed, begins hilariously to whirl and pulse with a mix of rebelliousness and constriction that I take to be Oedipal.

~John Updike

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The reader knows the writer better than he knows himself; but the writer's physical presence is light from a star that has moved on.

~John Updike

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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

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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

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There should always be something gratuitous about art, just as there seems to be, according to the new-wave cosmologists, something gratuitous about the universe.

~John Updike

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Biography

Nationality: American

Type: Novelist

Born: March 18th, 1932

Died: January 27th, 2009

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