John Updike Famous Quotes
"Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right, or doing it better."
"The yearning for an afterlife is the opposite of selfish it is love and praise for the world that we are privileged, in this complex interval of light, to witness and experience."
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.
"Creativity is merely a plus name for regular activity . . . any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about dong it right, or better."
"If men do not keep on speaking terms with children, they cease to be men, and become merely machines for eating and earning money."
"Art is like baby shoes. When you coat them with gold, they can no longer be worn."
"The 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."
"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."
"Four years was enough of Harvard. I still had a lot to learn, but had been given the liberating notion that now I could teach myself."
"Perfectionism is the enemy of creation, as extreme self-solicitude is the enemy of well-being."
America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy.
"Dreams come true. Without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them."
I love my government not least for the extent to which it leaves me alone.
"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."
We are most alive when we're in love.
A healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people's patience.
John Updike Quotations
"O Romeo, Romeo wherefore art thou Romeo"
William Shakespeare
Technological progress is like an axe in the hands of a pathological criminal.
Albert Einstein
"No matter what happens, there's always somebody who knew it would"
Lonny Starr
Nothing is so difficult but that it may be found out by seeking.
Terence
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
Margaret Wolfe Hungerford
"More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly."
Woody Allen
"Quitting smoking is easy, I've done it hundreds of times."
Mark Twain
"Without freedom, no art art lives only on the restraints it imposes on itself, and dies of all others."
Albert Camus
"If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all."
Virginia
You can't put the toothpaste back in the tube.
H R Haldeman