Quotes 3- 18 - 17
John Updike Quotes
American - Novelist March 18, 1932 - January 27, 2009
I don't know; I think I'd be gloomy without some faith that there is a purpose and there is a kind of witness to my life.
John Updike
Being naked approaches being revolutionary; going barefoot is mere populism.
John Updike
Most of American life consists of driving somewhere and then returning home, wondering why the hell you went.
John Updike
Creativity is merely a plus name for regular activity. Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right, or better.
John Updike
The first breath of adultery is the freest; after it, constraints aping marriage develop.
John Updike
Tiger Woods did not always win majors with ease; after his narrow victory in the 1999 PGA, he slumped and sighed as if he'd been carrying rocks uphill all afternoon.
John Updike
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.
John Updike
A healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people's patience.
John Updike
For some of us, books are intrinsic to our sense of personal identity.
John Updike
Americans have been conditioned to respect newness, whatever it costs them.
John Updike
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.
John Updike
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.
John Updike
Art is like baby shoes. When you coat them with gold, they can no longer be worn.
John Updike
We are most alive when we're in love.
John Updike
The essential self is innocent, and when it tastes its own innocence knows that it lives for ever.
John Updike
Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.
John Updike
To be President of the United States, sir, is to act as advocate for a blind, venomous, and ungrateful client.
John Updike
Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right or better.
John Updike
Arabic is very twisting, very beautiful. The call to prayer is quite haunting; it almost makes you a believer on the spot.
John Updike
Writers may be disreputable, incorrigible, early to decay or late to bloom but they dare to go it alone.
John Updike
What art offers is space - a certain breathing room for the spirit.
John Updike
America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy.
John Updike
Rain is grace; rain is the sky descending to the earth; without rain, there would be no life.
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.
John Updike
The writers we tend to universally admire, like Beckett, or Kafka, or TS Eliot, are not very prolific.
John Updike
I seem most instinctively to believe in the human value of creative writing, whether in the form of verse or fiction, as a mode of truth-telling, self-expression and homage to the twin miracles of creation and consciousness.
John Updike
Professionalism in art has this difficulty: To be professional is to be dependable, to be dependable is to be predictable, and predictability is esthetically boring - an anti-virtue in a field where we hope to be astonished and startled and at some deep level refreshed.
John Updike
For a long time, I was under the impression that 'Terry and the Pirates' was the best comic strip in the United States.
John Updike
Existence itself does not feel horrible; it feels like an ecstasy, rather, which we have only to be still to experience.
John Updike
Inspiration arrives as a packet of material to be delivered.
John Updike
Every marriage tends to consist of an aristocrat and a peasant. Of a teacher and a learner.
John Updike
American art in general... takes to surreal exaggerations and metaphors; but its Puritan work ethic has little use for the playful self-indulgence behind Parisian Surrealism.
John Updike
Mars has long exerted a pull on the human imagination. The erratically moving red star in the sky was seen as sinister or violent by the ancients: The Greeks identified it with Ares, the god of war; the Babylonians named it after Nergal, god of the underworld. To the ancient Chinese, it was Ying-huo, the fire planet.
John Updike
Now that I am sixty, I see why the idea of elder wisdom has passed from currency.
John Updike
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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.
John Updike
Nature refuses to rest.
John Updike
Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face.
John Updike
I have never liked haircuts.
John Updike
America is beyond power; it acts as in a dream, as a face of God. Wherever America is, there is freedom, and wherever America is not, madness rules with chains, darkness strangles millions. Beneath her patient bombers, paradise is possible.
John Updike
Imagine writing a poem with a sweating, worried-looking boy handing you a different pencil at the end of every word. My golf, you may say, is no poem; nevertheless, I keep wanting it to be one.
John Updike
The substance of fictional architecture is not bricks and mortar but evanescent consciousness.
John Updike
The inner spaces that a good story lets us enter are the old apartments of religion.
John Updike
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.
John Updike
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.
John Updike
I think my first story sold for $550. This was in 1954, and it seemed like quite a lot of money, and I said to myself, 'Hey, I'm a professional writer now.'
John Updike
As movers and the moved both know, books are heavy freight, the weight of refrigerators and sofas broken up into cardboard boxes. They make us think twice about changing addresses.
John Updike
Reminiscence and self-parody are part of remaining true to oneself.
John Updike
From infancy on, we are all spies; the shame is not this but that the secrets to be discovered are so paltry and few.
John Updike
We take our bearings, daily, from others. To be sane is, to a great extent, to be sociable.
John Updike
Dreams come true; without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them.
John Updike
There is no pleasing New Englanders, my dear, their soil is all rocks and their hearts are bloodless absolutes.
John Updike
I should mention something that nobody ever thinks about, but proofreading takes a lot of time. After you write something, there are these proofs that keep coming, and there's this panicky feeling that 'This is me and I must make it better.'
John Updike
Hobbies take place in the cellar and smell of airplane glue.
John Updike
The cinema has done more for my spiritual life than the church. My ideas of fame, success and beauty all originate from the big screen. Whereas Christian religion is retreating everywhere and losing more and more influence; film has filled the vacuum and supports us with myths and action-controlling images.
John Updike
People are incorrigibly themselves.
John Updike
Old age treats freelance writers pretty gently.
John Updike
Golf's ultimate moral instruction directs us to find within ourselves a pivotal center of enjoyment: relax into a rhythm that fits the hills and swales, and play the shot at hand - not the last one, or the next one, but the one at your feet, in the poison ivy, where you put it.
John Updike
Sex is like money; only too much is enough.
John Updike
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.
John Updike
I was raised in the Depression, when there was a great sense of dog-eat-dog and people fighting over scraps.
John Updike
To guarantee the individual maximum freedom within a social frame of minimal laws ensures - if not happiness - its hopeful pursuit.
John Updike
There should always be something gratuitous about art, just as there seems to be, according to the new-wave cosmologists, something gratuitous about the universe.
John Updike
It's so hard to make a good tee shot after a birdie.
John Updike
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.
John Updike
We do survive every moment, after all, except the last one.
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.
John Updike
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.
John Updike
An affair wants to spill, to share its glory with the world. No act is so private it does not seek applause.
John Updike
Government is either organized benevolence or organized madness; its peculiar magnitude permits no shading.
John Updike
I know more about what it's like to be elderly and infirm and kind of stupid, the way you get forgetful, but on the other hand I'm a littler, wiser, dare we say? The word 'wisdom' has kind of faded out of our vocabulary, but yeah, I'm a little wiser.
John Updike
To be a human being is to be in a state of tension between your appetites and your dreams, and the social realities around you and your obligations to your fellow man.
John Updike
My life is, in a sense, trash. My life is only that of which the residue is my writing.
John Updike
Perhaps I have written fiction because everything unambiguously expressed seems somehow crass to me; and when the subject is myself, I want to jeer and weep.
John Updike
For many years, I read mystery novels for relaxation. But my tastes were too narrow - and, having read all of Agatha Christie and John Dickson Carr, I discovered that the implausibility and the thinness of the people distracted me unduly from the plot.
John Updike
We're past the age of heroes and hero kings... Most of our lives are basically mundane and dull, and it's up to the writer to find ways to make them interesting.
John Updike
I was an only child. I needed an alternative to family life - to real life, you could almost say - and cartoons, pictures in a book, the animated movies, seemed to provide it.
John Updike
Eros is everywhere. It is what binds.
John Updike
A seventeenth-century house can be recognized by its steep roof, massive central chimney and utter porchlessness. Some of those houses have a second-story overhang, emphasizing their medieval look.
John Updike
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.
John Updike
Until the 20th century it was generally assumed that a writer had said what he had to say in his works.
John Updike
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.
John Updike
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.
John Updike
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.
John Updike
I love my government not least for the extent to which it leaves me alone.
John Updike
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