Top 100 John Updike Quotes
#1. Lucas felt uncommonly depressed and careless. Drunkenness, in a man like August Hay, melts the restraints on cheerfulness. On the contrary with Lucas: he kept up courage consciously. Sap his mind, and the lid was lifted from a cesspool of muddy colors.
John Updike
#2. Is not the decisive difference between comedy and tragedy that tragedy denies us another chance?
John Updike
#4. You can go to the dark side of the moon and back and see nothing more wonderful and strange than the way men and women manage to get together.
John Updike
#5. A photograph presents itself not only as a visual representation, but as evidence, more convincing than a painting because of the unimpeachable mechanical means whereby it was made. We do not trust the artist's flattering hand; but we do trust film, and shadows, and light.
John Updike
#6. Mozart's music gives us permission to live.
John Updike
#8. We all begin life as parasites within the mother, and writers begin their existence imitatively, within the body of letters.
John Updike
#9. I must go to Nature disarmed of perspective and stretch myself like a large transparent canvas upon her in the hope that, my submission being perfect, the imprint of a beautiful and useful truth would be taken.
John Updike
#10. We must have sinned greatly, at some juncture long buried in our protozoic past, to deserve such a universe
John Updike
#11. Having children is something we think we ought to do because our parents did it, but when it is over the children are just other members of the human race, rather disappointingly.
John Updike
#12. A cynic is a kind of romantic who has aged.
John Updike
#13. The essential self is innocent, and when it tastes its own innocence knows that it lives for ever.
John Updike
#14. 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
#15. Though old himself, he disliked old men.
John Updike
#16. But with his mother there's no question of liking him they're not even in a way separate people he began in her stomach and if she gave him life she can take it away and if he feels that withdrawal it will be the grave itself.
John Updike
#17. President George] Bush talked to us like we were a bunch of morons and we ate it up. Can you imagine, the Pledge of Allegiance, read my lips-can you imagine such crap in this day and age?
John Updike
#18. What we need is progress with an escape hatch.
John Updike
#19. First snow: it came this year late in November.
John Updike
#20. For some of us, books are intrinsic to our sense of personal identity.
John Updike
#21. Chaos is God's body. Order is the Devil's chains.
John Updike
#22. Suspect each moment, for it is a thief, tiptoeing away with more than it brings.
John Updike
#23. One hundred thirty years after Abe Lincoln, re Republicans have got the anti-black vote and it's bigger than any Democratic Presidential candidate can cope with.
John Updike
#24. Prose should have a flow, the forward momentum of a certain energized weight; it should feel like a voice tumbling in your ear.
John Updike
#25. We do survive every moment, after all, except the last one.
John Updike
#26. Actuality is a running impoverishment of possibility.
John Updike
#27. 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
#28. I don't think about politics," Rabbit says. "That's one of my Goddam precious American rights, not to think about politics.
John Updike
#29. 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
#30. That's the genius of the capitalist system: Either you're rich, or you want to be, or you think you ought to be.
John Updike
#31. How circumstantial reality is! Facts are like individual letters, with their spikes and loops and thorns, that make up words: eventually they hurt our eyes, and we long to take a bath, to rake the lawn, to look at the sea.
John Updike
#32. Do what the heart commands. The heart is our only guide.
John Updike
#33. Existence itself does not feel horrible; it feels like an ecstasy, rather, which we have only to be still to experience.
John Updike
#34. My first ambition was to be an animator for Walt Disney. Then I wanted to be a magazine cartoonist.
John Updike
#35. The study of literature threatens to become a kind of paleontology of failure, and criticism a supercilious psychoanalysis of authors.
John Updike
#36. Money is like water in a leaky bucket: no sooner there, it begins to drip.
John Updike
#37. He sounds to himself, saying this, like an impersonator; life, just as we first thought, is playing grownup.
John Updike
#38. The United States, democratic and various though it is, is not an easy country for a fiction-writer to enter: the slot between the fantastic and the drab seems too narrow.
John Updike
#39. As I get older, my childhood self becomes more accessible to me, but selectively, in images as stylized and suspect as moments remembered from a novel read years ago.
John Updike
#40. By the mid-17th century, telescopes had improved enough to make visible the seasonally growing and shrinking polar ice caps on Mars, and features such as Syrtis Major, a dark patch thought to be a shallow sea.
John Updike
#41. Golf at its measured pace permits an electric excess of mental activity.
John Updike
#42. Tall as he is, there is no carrying the slope under his shirt as anything other than a loose gut, a paunch that in itself must weigh as much as a starving Ethiopian child.
John Updike
#43. 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
#44. Writers take words seriously - perhaps the last professional class that does - and they struggle to steer their own through the crosswinds of meddling editors and careless typesetters and obtuse and malevolent reviewers into the lap of the ideal reader.
John Updike
#45. 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
#48. 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
#49. On the single strand of wire strung to bring our house electricity, grackles and starlings neatly punctuated an invisible sentence.
John Updike
#50. His gray suit makes him seem extra vulnerable, in the way of children placed in unaccustomed clothes for ceremonies they don't understand.
John Updike
#51. 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.
John Updike
#52. What you haven't done by thirty you're not likely to do. What you have done you'll do lots more.
John Updike
#53. Sometimes it seems the whole purpose of pets is to bring death into the house.
John Updike
#54. It's sort of good to see your vocation as a daily task and have fairly modest expectations for financial or reward in other coin - glory, love, whatever.
John Updike
#55. The fucking world is running out of gas.
John Updike
#56. She had willed herself open to him and knew that the chemistry of love was all within her, her doing. Even his power to wound her with neglect was a power she had created and granted ...
John Updike
#57. So, you know, I think any life has in it enough material, enough points of departure, to fuel a writer's career and that we shouldn't worry about what we're not but to try to focus on what we are and what we do know.
John Updike
#58. The throat: how strange, that there is not more erotic emphasis upon it. For here, through this compound pulsing pillar, our life makes its leap into spirit, and in the other direction gulps down what it needs of the material world.
John Updike
#59. The theme of old age doesn't seem to fascinate Hollywood.
John Updike
#60. His insides are beginning to feel sickly. The pain of the world is a crater all these syrups and pills a thousandfold would fail to fill.
John Updike
#61. 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
#62. Intent on prayer, she has a dumb girl's sweet piercing way of putting her whole body into one thing at a time.
John Updike
#63. In a country this large and a language even larger ... there ought to be a living for somebody who cares and wants to entertain and instruct a reader.
John Updike
#64. You cannot help but learn more as take the world into your hands. Take it up reverently, for it is and old piece of clay, with millions of thumbprints on it.
John Updike
#66. What's beauty if it's not, in the end, true? Beauty is truth, and truth is beauty.
John Updike
#67. One of the nice things about having a lover, it makes you think about everything anew. The rest of your life becomes a kind of movie, flat and even rather funny.
John Updike
#68. In art, anything goes, and if it goes, it goes.
John Updike
#69. Who'll hold families together, if everybody has to live? Living is a compromise, between doing what you want and doing what other people want.
John Updike
#70. Religion enables us to ignore nothingness and get on with the jobs of life.
John Updike
#71. It's great to have an enemy. Sharpens your senses.
John Updike
#72. You do things and do things and nobody really has a clue.
John Updike
#73. Without books, we might just melt into the airwaves and be just another set of blips.
John Updike
#74. A Christian novelist tries to describe the world as it is.
John Updike
#75. Hobbies take place in the cellar and smell of airplane glue.
John Updike
#76. I'm always looking for insights into the real Doris Day because I'm stuck with this infatuation and need to explain it to myself.
John Updike
#77. Sun and moon, sun and moon, time goes.
John Updike
#78. Movies are, like sharp sunlight, merciless; we do not imagine, we view.
John Updike
#79. 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
#80. It is not enough for a story to flow. It has to kind of trickle and glint as it crosses over the stones of the bare facts.
John Updike
#81. New York is, of course, many cities, and an exile does not return to the one he left.
John Updike
#82. Being a famous writer is a little like being a tall dwarf. You're on the edge of normality.
John Updike
#83. Movies took you right up to the edge but kept you safe.
John Updike
#84. Arabic is very twisting, very beautiful. The call to prayer is quite haunting; it almost makes you a believer on the spot.
John Updike
#85. The New England spirit does not seek solutions in a crowd; raw light and solitariness are less dreaded than welcomed as enhancers of our essential selves.
John Updike
#86. My transition from wanting to be a cartoonist to wanting to be a writer may have come about through that friendly opposition, that even-handed pairing, of pictures and words.
John Updike
#87. 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
#88. Human was the music, natural was the static.
John Updike
#89. I would write ads for deodorants or labels for catsup bottles, if I had to. The miracle of turning inklings into thoughts and thoughts into words and words into metal and print and ink never palls for me.
John Updike
#90. My mother didn't raise me to be a critic, but I seem to have become one anyway.
John Updike
#91. My actinic keratosis is a result of the triumphalism of the beach. The sun exacerbates it.
John Updike
#92. Memory has a spottiness, as if the film was sprinkled with developer instead of immersed in it.
John Updike
#93. I warned you, he says, I warned you, Harry, but youth is deaf. Youth is careless.
John Updike
#95. The artist brings something into the world that didn't exist before, and he does it without destroying something else.
John Updike
#96. I imagine most of that stuff on the information highway is roadkill anyway.
John Updike
#97. The inner spaces that a good story lets us enter are the old apartments of religion.
John Updike
#98. Reminiscence and self-parody are part of remaining true to oneself.
John Updike
#99. The other sad truth about golf spectatorship is that for today's pros it all comes down to the putting, and that the difference between a putt that drops and one that rims the cup, though teleologically enormous, is intellectually negligeable.
John Updike
#100. The lust to meet authors ranks low, I think, on the roll of holy appetites; but it is an authentic pang.
John Updike
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