John Updike Quotes (95 Quotes)


    Among the repulsions of atheism for me has been its drastic uninterestingness as an intellectual position. Where was the ingenuity, the ambiguity, the humanity (in the Harvard sense) of saying that the universe just happened to happen and that when we're dead we're dead.

    Vagueness and procrastination are ever a comfort to the frail in spirit.

    You cannot help but learn more as you take the world into your hands. Take it up reverently, for it is an old piece of clay, with millions of thumbprints on it.

    Four years was enough of Harvard. I still had a lot to learn, but had been given the liberating notion that now I could teach myself.

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


    The essential support and encouragement comes from within, arising out of the mad notion that your society needs to know what only you can tell it.

    The heart prefers to move against the grain of circumstance perversity is the soul's very life.

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


    Sex is like money; only too much is enough.

    If men do not keep on speaking terms with children, they cease to be men, and become merely machines for eating and for earning money.

    A narrative is like a room on whose walls a number of false doors have been painted; while within the narrative, we have many apparent choices of exit, but when the author leads us to one particular door, we know it is the right one because it opens.

    From infancy on, we are all spies; the shame is not this but that the secrets to be discovered are so paltry and few.

    The crooked little tomato branches, pulpy and pale as if made of cheap green paper, broke under the weight of so much fruit there was something frantic in such fertility, a crying-out like that of children frantic to please.

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

    Religion enables us to ignore nothingness and get on with the jobs of life.

    Customs and convictions change; respectable people are the last to know, or to admit, the change, and the ones most offended by fresh reflections of the facts in the mirror of art.

    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 over animation. One can either see or be seen.

    Art imitates Nature in this not to dare is to dwindle.

    Natural beauty is essentially temporary and sad hence the impression of obscene mockery which artificial flowers give us.

    School is where you go between when your parents can't take you, and industry can't take you.

    Life is a razor, you are always in hot water or a scrape.

    The stripped and shapely Maple grieves The ghosts of her Departed leaves. The ground is hard, As hard as stone. The year is old, The birds are flown.

    Bankruptcy is a sacred state, a condition beyond conditions, as theologians might say, and attempts to investigate it are necessarily obscene, like spiritualism. One knows only that he has passed into it and lives beyond us, in a condition not ours.

    It is not difficult to deceive the first time, for the deceived possesses no antibodies unvaccinated by suspicion, she overlooks lateness, accepts absurd excuses, permits the flimsiest patching to repair great rents in the quotidian.

    The creative writer uses his life as well as being its victim he can control, in his work, the self-presentation that in actuality is at the mercy of a thousand accidents.

    I love my government not least for the extent to which it leaves me alone.

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

    Now that I am sixty, I see why the idea of elder wisdom has passed from currency.

    Doctorow here appears not so much a re-constructor of history as a visionary who seeks in time past occasions for poetry.

    America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy.

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

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

    A healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people's patience.

    Facts are generally overesteemed. For most practical purposes, a thing is what men think it is. When they judged the earth flat, it was flat. As long as men thought slavery tolerable, tolerable it was. We live down here among shadows, shadows among shadows.

    Art is like baby shoes. When you coat them with gold, they can no longer be worn.

    To say that war is madness is like saying that sex is madness true enough, from the standpoint of a stateless eunuch, but merely a provocative epigram for those who must make their arrangements in the world as given

    Inspiration arrives as a packet of material to be delivered.

    That a marriage ends is less than ideal; but all things end under heaven, and if temporality is held to be invalidating, then nothing real succeeds.

    Our brains are no longer conditioned for reverence and awe. We cannot imagine a Second Coming that would not be cut down to size by the televised evening news, or a Last Judgment not subject to pages of holier-than-thou second-guessing in The New York Review of Books.

    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.

    Life is a nacho. It can be yummy-crunchy or squishy-yucky. It just depends on how long it takes for you to start eating it.

    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.

    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.

    Possession diminishes perception of value, immediately.

    To be President of the United States, sir, is to act as advocate for a blind, venomous, and ungrateful client.

    He skates saucily over great tracts of confessed ignorance.

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

    The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.

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


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