Vagueness and procrastination are ever a comfort to the frail in spirit. John Updike More Quotes by John Updike More Quotes From John Updike What seems to sell books is good word-of-mouth, not promotion tours. I'm too old to believe that media promotion of a book really matters. What matters is how it will look 100 years from now, not how many copies are sold. John Updike what-matters believe book 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. John Updike careers worry thinking Seemed 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 Updike personality writing people Americans have been conditioned to respect newness, whatever it cost them. John Updike Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right, or doing it better. John Updike Creativity is merely a plus name for regular activity . . . any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about dong it right, or better. John Updike I think taste is a social concept and not an artistic one. I'm willing to show good taste, if I can, in somebody else's living room, but our reading life is too short for a writer to be in any way polite. Since his words enter into another's brain in silence and intimacy, he should be as honest and explicit as we are with ourselves. John Updike If men do not keep on speaking terms with children, they cease to be men, and become merely machines for eating and earning money. John Updike Perfectionism is the enemy of creation, as extreme self-solicitude is the enemy of well-being. John Updike The founding fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called education. School is where you go between when your parents can't take you and industry can't take you. John Updike There are times when fear is good It must keep its watchful place at the heart's controls. There is advantage in the wisdom won from pain. John Updike Mars has long exerted a pull on the human imagination. The erratically moving red star in the sky was seen as sinister or violent by the ancients: The Greeks identified it with Ares, the god of war; the Babylonians named it after Nergal, god of the underworld. To the ancient Chinese, it was Ying-huo, the fire planet. John Updike fire god sky war The miracle of turning inklings into thoughts and thoughts into words and words into metal and print and ink never palls for me. John Updike thoughts words never me 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 me mystery people years The theme of old age doesn't seem to fascinate Hollywood. John Updike old old-age theme age The substance of fictional architecture is not bricks and mortar but evanescent consciousness. John Updike bricks consciousness architecture I seem most instinctively to believe in the human value of creative writing, whether in the form of verse or fiction, as a mode of truth-telling, self-expression and homage to the twin miracles of creation and consciousness. John Updike value creative writing believe The study of literature threatens to become a kind of paleontology of failure, and criticism a supercilious psychoanalysis of authors. John Updike failure study criticism literature Tiger Woods did not always win majors with ease; after his narrow victory in the 1999 PGA, he slumped and sighed as if he'd been carrying rocks uphill all afternoon. John Updike tiger win woods victory I was an only child. I needed an alternative to family life - to real life, you could almost say - and cartoons, pictures in a book, the animated movies, seemed to provide it. John Updike child you family life
