Frases de John Updike
John Updike
Data de nascimento: 18. Março 1932
Data de falecimento: 27. Janeiro 2009
Outros nomes:Con Apdayk, John Hoyer Updike
John Hoyer Updike foi um escritor, novelista e crítico literário estadunidense.
Formou-se na Universidade de Harvard em 1954 e passou um ano na Inglaterra, no Knox Fellowsship, na Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, em Oxford. De 1955 a 1957, trabalhou na The New Yorker, contribuindo com contos, poemas e críticas de livros.
Tornou-se famoso e reconhecido mundialmente com sua séria de novelas Rabbit, iniciada em 1960, que seguem a vida do jogador de basquetebol Harry 'Rabbit' Angstrom, escritas num período de mais de trinta anos e pelas quais ganhou por duas vezes o Prêmio Pullitzer.
Também de sua autoria, As Bruxas de Eastwick, escrito em 1984, tornou-se um best-seller e grande sucesso no cinema, no filme homônimo estrelado por Jack Nicholson e Cher.
Em sua obra constam doze livros de ficção, cinco volumes de poesia e uma peça de teatro.
Considerado um dos grandes novelistas contemporâneos norte-americanos, faleceu em 27 de janeiro de 2009, vítima de câncer do pulmão, em Beverly, no estado de Massachussets, onde residia.
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Escritor, poeta e crítico americano
Citações John Updike
„It is easy to love people in memory; the hard thing is to love them when they are there in front of you.“
— John Updike, My Father's Tears and Other Stories
„Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face.“
— John Updike, Self-Consciousness
Context: Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face. As soon as one is aware of being “somebody,” to be watched and listened to with extra interest, input ceases, and the performer goes blind and deaf in his overanimation. One can either see or be seen.
Ch. 6
„I think “taste” is a social concept and not an artistic one.“
— John Updike
Context: I think “taste” is a social concept and not an artistic one. I’m willing to show good taste, if I can, in somebody else’s living room, but our reading life is too short for a writer to be in any way polite. Since his words enter into another’s brain in silence and intimacy, he should be as honest and explicit as we are with ourselves.
Interview in New York Times Book Review (10 April 1977). later published in Conversations with John Updike (1994) edited by James Plath, p. 113
„I miss only, and then only a little, in the late afternoon, the sudden white laughter that like heat lightning bursts in an atmosphere where souls are trying to serve the impossible.“
— John Updike
Context: I miss only, and then only a little, in the late afternoon, the sudden white laughter that like heat lightning bursts in an atmosphere where souls are trying to serve the impossible. My father for all his mourning moved in the atmosphere of such laughter. He would have puzzled you. He puzzled me. His upper half was hidden from me, I knew best his legs.
„It was true of my generation, that the movies were terribly vivid and instructive.“
— John Updike
Context: It was true of my generation, that the movies were terribly vivid and instructive. There were all kinds of things you learned. Like the 19th century novels, you saw how other social classes lived — especially the upper classes. So in a funny way, they taught you manners almost. But also moral manners. The gallantry of a Gary Cooper or an Errol Flynn or Jimmy Stewart. It was ethical instruction of a sort that the church purported to be giving you, but in a much less digestible form. Instead of these remote, crabbed biblical verses, you had contemporary people acting out moral dilemmas. Just the grace, the grace of those stars — not just the dancing stars, but the way they all moved with a certain grace. All that sank deep into my head, and my soul.
„It's no disgrace to, in the end, restore order. And punish the wicked and, in some way, reward the righteous.“
— John Updike
Context: In the old movies, yes, there always was the happy ending and order was restored. As it is in Shakespeare's plays. It's no disgrace to, in the end, restore order. And punish the wicked and, in some way, reward the righteous.
„The city overwhelmed our expectations.“
— John Updike
Context: The city overwhelmed our expectations. The Kiplingesque grandeur of Waterloo Station, the Eliotic despondency of the brick row in Chelsea … the Dickensian nightmare of fog and sweating pavement and besmirched cornices.
On London, in “A Madman,” New Yorker (22 December 1962)
„His upper half was hidden from me, I knew best his legs.“
— John Updike
Context: I miss only, and then only a little, in the late afternoon, the sudden white laughter that like heat lightning bursts in an atmosphere where souls are trying to serve the impossible. My father for all his mourning moved in the atmosphere of such laughter. He would have puzzled you. He puzzled me. His upper half was hidden from me, I knew best his legs.
„Vocations drying up, nobody wants to be selfless any more, everybody wants their fun.“
— John Updike
Context: Now nuns have blended into everybody else or else faded away. Vocations drying up, nobody wants to be selfless any more, everybody wants their fun. No more nuns, no more rabbis. No more good people, waiting to have their fun in the afterlife. The thing about the afterlife, it kept this life within bounds somehow, like the Russians. Now there's just Japan, and technology, and the profit motive, and getting all you can while you can.
