John Updike Quotes (95 Quotes)

Life is a video game. No matter how good you get, you are always zapped in the end.

How do you write women so well I think of a man and I take away reason and accountability.

He had a sensation of anxiety and shame, a sensitivity acute beyond usefulness, as if the nervous system, flayed of its old hide of social usage, must record every touch of pain.

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

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

Life is a roller coaster, you have your ups and downs unless you fall off.

We do survive every moment, after all, except the last one.

Until the 20th century it was generally assumed that a writer had said what he had to say in his works.

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.

I secretly understood the primitive appeal of the hearth. Television is-its irresistible charm-a fire.

Truth should not be forced; it should simply manifest itself, like a woman who has in her privacy reflected and coolly decided to bestow herself upon a certain man.

Looking foolish does the spirit good. The need not to look foolish is one of youth's many burdens as we get older we are exempted from more and more, and float upward in our heedlessness, singing Gratia Dei sum quod sum.

Many men are more faithful to their golf partners than to their wives and have stuck with them longer.

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.

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

The guarantee that our self enjoys an intended relation to the outer world is most, if not all, we ask from religion. God is the self projected onto reality by our natural and necessary optimism. He is the not-me personified.

Her sentences march under a harsh sun that bleaches color from them but bestows a peculiar, invigorating, Pascalian clarity.

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

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

It rots a writer's brain, it cretinises you. You say the same thing again and again, and when you do that happily you're well on the way to being a cretin. Or a politician.

Life is like an overlong drama through which we sit being nagged by the vague memories of having read the reviews.

By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.

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

There's a crystallization that goes on in a poem which the young man can bring off, but which the middle-aged man can't.

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

What more fiendish proof of cosmic irresponsibility than a Nature which, having invented sex as a way to mix genes, then permits to arise, amid all its perfumed and hypnotic inducements to mate, a tireless tribe of spirochetes and viruses that torture and kill us for following orders

Upon shaving off one's beard. The scissors cut the long-grown hair the razor scrapes the remnant fuzz. Small-jawed, weak-chinned, bug-eyed, I stare at the forgotten boy I was.

I would rather have as my patron a host of anonymous citizens digging into their own pockets for the price of a book or a magazine than a small body of enlightened and responsible men administering public funds. I would rather chance my personal vision of truth striking home here and there in the chaos of publication that exists than attempt to filter it through a few sets of official, honorably public-spirited scruples.

Government is either organized benevolence or organized madness; its peculiar magnitude permits no shading.

It was one of history's great love stories, the mutually profitable romance which Hollywood and bohunk America conducted almost in the dark, a tapping of fervent messages through the wall of the San Gabriel Range.

Every marriage tends to consist of an aristocrat and a peasant. Of a teacher and a learner.

In asking forgiveness of women for our mythologizing of their bodies, for being unreal about them, we can only appeal to their own sexuality, which is different but not basically different, perhaps, from our own. For women, too, there seems to be that tangle of supplication and possessiveness, that descent toward infantile undifferentiation, that omnipotent helplessness, that merger with the cosmic mother-warmth, that flushed pulse-quickened leap into overestimation, projection, general mix-up.

Perfectionism is the enemy of creation, as extreme self-solicitude is the enemy of well-being.

Boys are playing basketball around a telephone pole with a backboard bolted to it.

When we try in good faith to believe in materialism, in the exclusive reality of the physical, we are asking our selves to step aside we are disavowing the very realm where we exist and where all things precious are kept -- the realm of emotion and conscience, of memory and intention and sensation.

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.

Suspect each moment, for it is a thief,tiptoeing away withmore than it brings.

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.

There is this quality in things, of the Right was seeming Wrong at first. To test our faith

I would especially like to recourt the Muse of poetry, who ran off with the mailman four years ago, and drops me only a scribbled postcard from time to time.

The first breath of adultery is the freest; after it, constraints aping marriage develop.

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.

Americans have been conditioned to respect newness, whatever it costs them.

For male and female alike, the bodies of the other sex are messages signaling what we must do, they are glowing signifiers of our own necessities.

There is no pleasing New Englanders, my dear, their soil is all rocks and their hearts are bloodless absolutes.