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John Updike Biography

John Hoyer Updike (March 18, 1932 – January 27, 2009) was an American novelist, poet, short story writer, art critic, and literary critic. One of only three writers to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction more than once (the others were Booth Tarkington and William Faulkner), Updike published more than twenty novels, more than a dozen short-story collections, as well as poetry, art and literary criticism and children's books during his career.

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John Updike Quotes

There are some women that don't do it for some men. That's why they turn out so many models.

Men, Models, Turn, Turns, Women

Movies took you right up to the edge but kept you safe.

Edge, Inspiring, Kept, Movie, Safe

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

Enables, Ignore, Jobs, Literature, Religion

Nothing feels worse than other people's good times.

Feels, Good, Good Times, People, Times

And there was, in those Ipswich years, for me at least, a raw educational component; though I used to score well in academic tests, I seemed to know very little of how the world worked and was truly grateful for instruction, whether it was how to stroke a backhand, mix a martini, use a wallpaper steamer, or do the Twist. My wife, too, seemed willing to learn. Old as we must have looked to our children, we were still taking lessons, in how to be grown-up.

Children, Educational, Happiness, Seemed, Years

God is in the tiger as well as in the lamb.

God, Lamb, Lambs, Tiger, Wells

Money is like water in a leaky bucket: no sooner there, it begins to drip.

Begins, Buckets, Like, Money, Water

Critics are like pigs at the pastry cart.

Critics, Like, Past, Pigs

President George] Bush talked to us like we were a bunch of morons and we ate it up. Can you imagine, the Pledge of Allegiance, read my lips-can you imagine such crap in this day and age?

Age, Bush, Lips, President, Read

The fact that we still live well cannot ease the feeling that we no longer live nobly.

Ease, Fact, Facts, Feeling, Feelings, Live

What you haven't done by thirty you're not likely to do. What you have done you'll do lots more.

Done, Havens, Likely, Lots, Thirty

Men emerge pale from the little printing plant at four sharp, ghosts for an instant, blinking, until the outdoor light overcomes the look of constant indoor light clinging to them.

Constant, Four, Light, Men, Overcoming, Plant

Bankruptcy is a sacred state, a condition beyond conditions, as theologians might say, and attempts to investigate it are necessarily obscene, like spiritualism. One knows only that he has passed into it and lives beyond us, in a condition not ours.

Bankruptcy, Conditions, Debt, Knows, Might, Sacred

It seems to me the book has not just aesthetic values - the charming little clothy box of the thing, the smell of the glue, even the print, which has its own beauty. But there's something about the sensation of ink on paper that is in some sense a thing, a phenomenon rather than an epiphenomenon. I can't break the association of electric trash with the computer screen. Words on the screen give the sense of being just another passing electronic wriggle.

Book, Giving, Sense, Smell, Values

Government money in the arts, I fear, can only deflect artists from their responsibility to find an authentic market for their products.

Art, Arts, Government, Market, Responsibility

So, you know, I think any life has in it enough material, enough points of departure, to fuel a writer's career and that we shouldn't worry about what we're not but to try to focus on what we are and what we do know.

Career, Careers, Departure, Know, Thinking, Worry

Being able to write becomes a kind of shield, a way of hiding, a way of too instantly transforming pain into honey.

Becomes, Honey, Pain, Writing

Fiction is very greedy. It will take all you know and then some. The first novel I tried to write, I was struck by this - the appetite of the blank page for ever more information, ever more data. An empty book is a greedy thing. You are right: You wind up using everything you know, and often more than once.

Book, Fiction, Struck, Tried, Wind, Writing

The difference between a childhood and a boyhood must be this: our childhood is what we alone have had; our boyhood is what any boy in our environment would have had.

Boy, Boyhood, Boys, Childhood, Children, Differences

The guarantee that our self enjoys an intended relation to the outer world is most, if not all, we ask from religion. God is the self projected onto reality by our natural and necessary optimism. He is the not-me personified.

Ask, Guarantee, Guarantees That, Personified, Reality, Self

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