top of page
"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."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Art quotes

"Poetry most often communicates emotions, not directly, but by creating imaginatively the grounds for those emotions. It therefore communicates something more than the emotion; only by means of that something more does it communicate the emotion at all."

"We often forget to draw a new picture because we are so busy criticizing other paintings."

"A beautiful poem is nothing but a mirror of philosophy through which we can see life's pure beauty."

"Poets create a beautiful blue sky where you can fly with wings of imagination and find yourself again and again."

"The object of art is to enhance the beauty, imaginations and joy of life."

"A picture may be worth a thousand words, but those well-arranged words are worth a multi-million-dollar motion picture."

"Literature tries to express the intricate inner beauties of life. Philosophy tries to explain the intricate inner beauties and conflicts of thoughts."
Explore more quotes by John Updike

"When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas."

"I was made to feel I could do things. If you get this feeling early and can hold it until you're 15, you tend to never lose it."

"The difficulty with humourists is that they will mix what they believe with what they don't whichever seems likelier to win an effect."

"Suddenly summoned to witness something great and horrendous, we keep fighting not to reduce it to our own smallness."

"On the single strand of wire strung to bring our house electricity, grackles and starlings neatly punctuated an invisible sentence."

"In fact we do not try to picture the afterlife, nor is it our selves in our nervous tics and optical flecks that we wish to perpetuate; it is the self as the window on the world that we can't bear to thinkof shutting. My mind when I was a boy of ten or eleven sent up its silent scream at the thought of future aeons -- at the thought of the cosmic party going on without me. The yearning for an afterlife is the opposite of selfish: it is love and praise of the world that we are privileged, in this complex interval of light, to witness and experience."
bottom of page