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"The substance of fictional architecture is not bricks and mortar but evanescent consciousness."
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"Every man's work, whether it be literature, or music or pictures or architecture or anything else, is always a portrait of himself."

"I was planning to go into architecture. But when I arrived, architecture was filled up. Acting was right next to it, so I signed up for acting instead."

"We shape our buildings thereafter they shape us."

"Rather than wait to see what the day or future holds, why not design and plan the future you want to experience?"

"Modern architecture predominately specializes in designing what are essentially dimly lit caves."

"We shape our buildings, thereafter they shape us."

"Nothing - really, absolutely nothing - says more about Victorian Britain and its capacity for brilliance than that the century's most daring and iconic building was entrusted to a gardener."

"The reality of the building does not consist in the roof and walls but in the space within to be lived in."

"A man of eighty has outlived probably three new schools of painting, two of architecture and poetry and a hundred in dress."

"On inspection, Gaudi's architecture isn't whimsical at all."
Explore more quotes by John Updike

"Golf appeals to the idiot in us and the child. Just how childlike golf players become is proven by their frequent inability to count past five."

"Each morning my characters greet me with misty faces willing, though chilled, to muster for another day's progress through the dazzling quicksand the marsh of blank paper."

"The thing about her is, she's good-natured. He knew it the second he saw her standing by the parking meters. He could just tell from the soft way her belly looked. With women, you keep bumping against them, because they want different things, they're a different race. Either they give, like a plant, or scrape, like a stone. In all the green world nothing feels as good as a woman's good nature."

"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."

"Dollars had once gathered like autumn leaves on the wooden collection plates; dollars were the flourishing sign of God's specifically American favor, made manifest in the uncountable millions of Carnegie and Mellon and Henry Ford and Catholina Lambert. But amid this fabled plenty the whiff of damnation had cleared of dollars and cents the parched ground around Clarence Wilmot."

"The essential self is innocent, and when it tastes its own innocence knows that it lives for ever."

"Professionalism in art has this difficulty: To be professional is to be dependable, to be dependable is to be predictable, and predictability is esthetically boring - an anti-virtue in a field where we hope to be astonished and startled and at some deep level refreshed."

"The fullness ends when we give Nature her ransom, when we make children for her. Then she is through with us, and we become, first inside, and then outside, junk. Flower stalks."

"The refusal to rest content, the willingness to risk excess on behalf of one's obsessions, is what distinguishes artists from entertainers, and what makes some artists adventurers on behalf of us all."

"In fiction, imaginary people become realer to us than any named celebrity glimpsed in a series of rumored events, whose causes and subtler ramifications must remain in the dark. An invented figure like Anna Karenina or Emma Bovary emerges fully into the light of understanding, which brings with it identification, sympathy and pity."
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