John Updike

Updike, John Filmography

• Play in Full Screen Fay Wray: A Life

  2009, role: actor , character name: Himself
• Play in Full Screen Ted Williams

  2009, role: writer
• Play in Full Screen Eastwick

  2002, role: writer
• Play in Full Screen LeseZeichen

  1999, role: actor , character name: Himself
• Play in Full Screen John Updike: In His Own Words

  1997, role: actor , character name: Himself
• Play in Full Screen A & P

  1996, role: writer
• Play in Full Screen The Witches of Eastwick

  1992, role: writer
• Play in Full Screen Doris Day: A Sentimental Journey

  1991, role: actor , character name: Himself
• Play in Full Screen The Witches of Eastwick

  1987, role: miscellaneous crew
• Play in Full Screen The Witches of Eastwick

  1987, role: writer
• Play in Full Screen Too Far to Go

  1979, role: writer
• Play in Full Screen The Music School

  1974, role: writer
• Play in Full Screen Rabbit, Run

  1970, role: writer

Famous quotes by John Updike:

"A leader is one who, out of madness or goodness, volunteers to take upon himself the woe of the people. There are few men so foolish, hence the erratic quality of leadership in the world."

"Dreams come true; without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them."

"What art offers is space - a certain breathing room for the spirit."

"Rain is grace; rain is the sky condescending to the earth; without rain, there would be no life."

"Writers may be disreputable, incorrigible, early to decay or late to bloom but they dare to go it alone."

"We are most alive when we're in love."

"Writing and rewriting are a constant search for what it is one is saying"

"Creativity is merely a plus name for regular activity. Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right, or better."

"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."

"Sex is like money; only too much is enough."

"We take our bearings, daily, from others. To be sane is, to a great extent, to be sociable."

"The inner spaces that a good story lets us enter are the old apartments of religion."

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

"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 an education."

"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."

"Being naked approaches being revolutionary; going barefoot is mere populism."

"Existence itself does not feel horrible; it feels like an ecstasy, rather, which we have only to be still to experience."

"Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right or better."

"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."

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

John Updike

Born: 1932-03-18

Died: 2009-01-27