The measure of artistic merit is the length to which a writer is willing to go in following his own compulsions. John Updike More Quotes by John Updike More Quotes From John Updike Suddenly summoned to witness something great and horrendous, we keep fighting not to reduce it to our own smallness. John Updike smallness witness fighting The Englishman is under no constitutional obligation to believe that all men are created equal. The American agony is therefore scarcely intelligible, like a saint's self-flagellation viewed by an atheist. John Updike atheist men believe Movies are, like sharp sunlight, merciless; we do not imagine, we view. John Updike movie imagine views That's the trouble with caring about anybody, you begin to feel overprotective. Then you begin to feel crowded. John Updike breakup caring trouble 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. John Updike differences boys children But it is just two lovers, holding hands and in a hurry to reach their car, their locked hands a starfish leaping through the dark. John Updike dark two hands I am sometimes visited by the heretical thought that there is no such thing as good and bad architecture, any more than there is good and bad nature. It is all in where you stand at the time. John Updike good-and-bad architecture sometimes What more fiendish proof of cosmic irresponsibility than a Nature which, having invented sex as a way to mix genes, then permits to arise, amid all its perfumed and hypnotic inducements to mate, a tireless tribe of spirochetes and viruses that torture and kill us for following orders? John Updike health order sex The scissors cut the long-grown hair; The razor scrapes the remnant fuzz. Small-jawed, weak-chinned, big-eyed, I stare At the forgotten boy I was. John Updike cutting hair boys Of plants tomatoes seemed the most human, eager and fragile and prone to rot. John Updike tomatoes plant food …he is unlike the other customers. They sense it too, and look at him with hard eyes, eyes like little metal studs pinned into the white faces of young men [...] In the hush his entrance creates, the excessive courtesy the weary woman behind the counter shows him amplifies his strangeness. He orders coffee quietly and studies the rim of the cup to steady the sliding in his stomach. He had thought, he had read, that from shore to shore all America was the same. He wonders, Is it just these people I’m outside or is it all America? John Updike coffee eye men Critics are like pigs at the pastry cart. John Updike critics pigs past It’s spring! Farewell To chills and colds! The blushing, girlish World unfolds Each flower, leaf And blade of sod— Small letters sent To her from God. John Updike farewell flower spring We all begin life as parasites within the mother, and writers begin their existence imitatively, within the body of letters. John Updike body mother letters ...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 Updike withdrawal mother people The worst thing in the world is a bitter woman. That's one thing about your mother, she's never been bitter. John Updike women mother world But it seems to me that once you begin a gesture it's fatal not to go through with it. John Updike gestures seems It's a man's world, they say; but in its daily textures it is a world created by and for women. John Updike texture women world "Hit it with the back of your left hand" was the first swing thought I ever heard, brusquely bu not unlovingly put to me by the aunt-in-law who had moments before placed a golf club in my virgin grip. I was twenty-five, and had spent my youth in a cloisterd precinct of teh middle class where golf was a rumoured something, like champagne breakfasts and divorce, that the rich did. John Updike aunt divorce golf 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 change reflection art
