top of page
"The cinema has done more for my spiritual life than the church. My ideas of fame, success and beauty all originate from the big screen. Whereas Christian religion is retreating everywhere and losing more and more influence; film has filled the vacuum and supports us with myths and action-controlling images."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Influence quotes

"Skepticism, like chastity, should not be relinquished too readily."

"The people of God are the driving force of every nation."

"In my opinion, the author-level metric can distort a real author's citation impact. For example, an author who has an h-index = 2 obtained on the basis of two published papers of which each is cited twenty times is more influential than an author who has an h-index = 3 obtained on the basis of three published papers of which each is cited three times."

"Money can bring the children into places of power and influence."
Explore more quotes by John Updike

"Most of American life consists of driving somewhere and then returning home, wondering why the hell you went."

"I know more about what it's like to be elderly and infirm and kind of stupid, the way you get forgetful, but on the other hand I'm a littler, wiser, dare we say? The word 'wisdom' has kind of faded out of our vocabulary, but yeah, I'm a little wiser."

"There is no such thing as static happiness. Happiness is a mixed thing, a thing compounded of sacrifices, and losses, and betrayals."

"An affair wants to spill, to share its glory with the world. No act is so private it does not seek applause."

"No matter how cheerful and blameless the day's activities have been, when you wake in the middle of the night there is guilt in the air, a gnawing feeling of everything being slightly off, wrong - you in the wrong, and the world too, as if darkness is a kind of light that shows us the depth we are about to fall into."

"Having children is something we think we ought to do because our parents did it, but when it is over the children are just other members of the human race, rather disappointingly."

"My first thought, as a child, was that the artist brings something into the world that didn't exist before, and that he does it without destroying something else. A kind of refutation of the conservation of matter. That still seems to me its central magic, its core of joy."

"But for a few phrases from his letters and an odd line or two of his verse, the poet walks gagged through his own biography."

"As long as Nelson was socked into baseball statistics or that guitar or even the rock records that threaded their sound through all the fibers of the house, his occupation of the room down the hall was no more uncomfortable than the persistence of Rabbit's own childhood in an annex of his brain; but when the stuff with hormones and girls and cars and beers began, Harry wanted out of fatherhood."

"Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea."
bottom of page