Top 100 Updike Quotes
#1. I once read Updike after writing a first draft, and I wanted to put my own book on the fire. I've since learned to read utter crap while I'm writing: pulp is the thing.
John Niven
#2. When you're in your 20s, your 30s, even, you have - at least, I had - vast ambitions, and you sit around mooning about these things, and you're depressed, because you haven't done them. And it takes you a long time to come to the realization that if you can't be John Updike, well, then, you can't.
Garrison Keillor
#3. But seriously, what were his parents thinking? Naming their son Richard Updike? Did they want him to get beaten up his entire adolescence?
Carolyn McCray
#4. It wasn't until I started to read short stories - by people like Alice Munro, Mavis Gallant, John Updike ... Eudora Welty - that I became excited about the possibilities of writing.
Carol Windley
#5. Neutrinos alone, among all the known particles, have ethereal properties that are striking and romantic enough both to have inspired a poem by John Updike and to have sent teams of scientists deep underground for 50 years to build huge science-fiction-like contraptions to unravel their mysteries.
Lawrence M. Krauss
#6. Tillie Olsen. James Joyce. Robert Stone. I must have read Updike's Rabbit, Run five times and Bellow's Herzog
Pamela Paul
#7. John Updike, in that book you gave me, he said the dead make space. Do you know what I think? Updike doesn't know dick about what it's like to be a homicide cop in Baltimore.
Laura Lippman
#8. Stories are hard. I have friends who knock out stories on a weekly or monthly basis, like they're running on medicinal-strength Updike. But for me a story is as daunting a prospect as a novel.
Junot Diaz
#9. English country life is more like Chekhov than 'The Archers' or Thomas Hardy or even the Updike ethic with which it is sometimes compared.
Jane Gardam
#10. I can't stand Anne Tyler books, but I gobble them up. It's like Updike - I can't stand him either, but I read everything he writes.
Caroline Thompson
#11. If writing is language and language is desire and longing and suffering ... then why when we write, when we make shapes on paper, why then does it so often look like the traditional, straight models, why does our longing look for example like John Updike's longing?
Carole Maso
#12. I would say that the writers I like and trust have at the base of their prose something called the English sentence. An awful lot of modern writing seems to me to be a depressed use of language. Once, I called it "vow-of-poverty prose." No, give me the king in his countinghouse. Give me Updike.
Martin Amis
#13. Thinking it over, I can't locate another artist in the Updike family.
John Updike
#14. Updike's style is an exquisite blend of Melville and Austen: reading him is like cutting through whale blubber with embroidery scissors.
Florence King
#15. John Updike's first published book was a collection of poems.
Jonathan Galassi
#16. [About John Updike's Rabbit Run] The author fails to convince us that his puppets are interesting in themselves, or that their plight has implications that transcend their narrow world.
Chicago Tribune
#17. John Updike once said that he was confused by the very concept of "antiwar," which he felt, and I'm paraphrasing him here, was like being "anti-food" or "anti-sex," since war was such an essential element of human experience.
Mark Bowden
#19. Updike worked this way, and I just kinda borrowed it from him. So the memoir will be relief from novel writing for a moment.
Rick Moody
#20. A John Updike is a once-in-a-generation phenomenon, if that generation is lucky: so comfortable in so many genres, the same lively, generous intelligence suffusing all he did.
George Saunders
#21. I'm sure I've been influenced by every fine writer I've ever read, from Dickens and Austen to Auden and Jane Hirshfield. And also, the short stories of Updike, Cheever, Munro, Alice Adams, and Doris Lessing. And the plays of Oscar Wilde. And paintings by Alice Neel and Matisse.
Amy Bloom
#22. Great books are readable anyway. Dickens is readable. Jane Austen is readable. John Updike's readable. Hawthorne's readable. It's a meaningless term. You have to go the very extremes of literature, like Joyce's "Finnegan's Wake," before you get a literary work that literally unreadable.
Julian Barnes
#23. One recalls John Updike's argument: the only evidence for the existence of God is the collective human yearning that it should be so.
Martin Amis
#24. And another regrettable thing about death is the ceasing of your own brand of magic, which took a whole life to develop and market - the quips, the witticisms, the slant adjusted to a few, those loved ones nearest the lip of the stage . . . - JOHN UPDIKE, "Perfection Wasted
Carole Radziwill
#25. Updike was the first to take the penile sensorium under the wing of elaborate metaphorical prose.
Nicholson Baker
#26. John Updike is always fun. And one of my former students, Tom Pynchon. And Harold Bloom, another former student.
M.H. Abrams
#27. Among contemporaries, I hugely admire Alice Munro, our Chekhov, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, and John Updike, American masters all. I also believe that the voice of Gordon Lish is astoundingly original and sorrowful.
Cynthia Ozick
#28. Billy Collins writes lovely poems. Limpid, gently and consistently startling, more serious than they seem, they describe all the worlds that are and were and some others besides.
John Updike
#29. Adversity in immunological doses has its uses; more than that crushes.
John Updike
#30. When I went away to college, I marveled at the wealth of bookstores around Harvard Square.
John Updike
#31. The firmest house in my fiction, probably, is the little thick-walled sandstone farmhouse of 'The Centaur' and 'Of the Farm'; I had lived in that house, and can visualize every floorboard and bit of worn molding.
John Updike
#32. Being able to write becomes a kind of shield, a way of hiding, a way of too instantly transforming pain into honey.
John Updike
#33. There is the fear that you somehow neglected to say what was really yours to say.
John Updike
#34. There is no doubt that I have lots of words inside me; but at moments, like rush-hour traffic at the mouth of a tunnel, they jam.
John Updike
#35. Vagueness and procrastination are ever a comfort to the frail in spirit.
John Updike
#36. 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
#37. Hemingway describes literary New York as a bottle full of tapeworms trying to feed on each other.
John Updike
#38. You know how it is with fathers, you never escape the idea that maybe after all they're right.
John Updike
#39. Of plants tomatoes seemed the most human, eager and fragile and prone to rot.
John Updike
#40. 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
#41. Is not the decisive difference between comedy and tragedy that tragedy denies us another chance?
John Updike
#42. Life is a razor, you are always in hot water or a scrape.
John Updike
#43. But it seems to me that once you begin a gesture it's fatal not to go through with it.
John Updike
#46. Driving is boring," Rabbit pontificates, "but it's what we do. Most of American life is driving somewhere and then driving back wondering why the hell you went.
John Updike
#47. 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.
John Updike
#48. The heart prefers to move against the grain of circumstance; perversity is the souls very life.
John Updike
#49. The first breath of adultery is the freest; after it, constraints aping marriage develop.
John Updike
#50. In a way, gluttony is an athletic feat, a stretching exercise.
John Updike
#51. One of the cool, chaste countries - Canada or Sweden.
John Updike
#52. I will try not to panic, to keep my standard of living modest and to work steadily, even shyly, in the spirit of those medieval carvers who so fondly sculpted the undersides of choir seats.
John Updike
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. A photograph offers us a glimpse into the abyss of time.
John Updike
#56. The dead teach this great lesson, which we are loathe to learn: we too will die.
John Updike
#57. The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.
John Updike
#58. The universe is a pointless, self running machine, and we are insignificant by-products, whom death will tuck back into oblivion, with or without holy fanfare.
John Updike
#59. 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.
John Updike
#60. If you're telling me I'm not mature, that's one thing I don't cry over since as far as I can make out it's the same thing as being dead.
John Updike
#61. It's the strange thing about you mystics, how often your little ecstasies wear a skirt.
John Updike
#62. Be what you are. Don't try to be Sally or Johnny or Fred next door; be yourself.
John Updike
#63. The world keeps ending but new people too dumb to know it keep showing up as if the fun's just started.
John Updike
#64. Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face.
John Updike
#65. So much love, too much love, it is our madness, it is rotting us out, exploding us like dandelion polls.
John Updike
#67. Chinese food in Texas is the best Chinese food in the United States except Boston.
John Updike
#68. Fiction is nothing less than the subtlest instrument for self-examination and self-display that Mankind has invented yet.
John Updike
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right, or better.
John Updike
#72. School is where you go between when your parents can't take you and industry can't take you.
John Updike
#73. Days, pale slices between nights, they blend, not exactly alike, transparencies so lightly tinted that only stacked all together do they darken to a fatal shade.
John Updike
#74. The golf swing is like a suitcase into which we are trying to pack one too many things.
John Updike
#75. Our tears fatten upon our memories of joy.
John Updike
#76. Whatever men make," she says, "what they felt when they made it is there ... Man is a means for turning things into spirit and turning spirit into things.
John Updike
#77. My father provided; he gathered things to himself and let them fall upon the world; my clothes, my food, my luxurious hopes had fallen to me from him, and for the first time his death seemed, even at its immense stellar remove of impossibility, a grave and dreadful threat.
John Updike
#78. 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
#79. Mozart's music gives us permission to live.
John Updike
#80. I really don't want to encourage young writers. Keep them down and out and silent is my motto.
John Updike
#81. The physicists are getting down to the nitty-gritty, they've really just about pared things down to the ultimate details, and the last thing they ever expected to happen is happening. God is showing through.
John Updike
#83. 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
#84. Geography! That's something they teach in the third grade! I never heard of a grownup studying geography.
John Updike
#85. There are some women that don't do it for some men. That's why they turn out so many models.
John Updike
#86. Rain is grace; rain is the sky descending to the earth; without rain, there would be no life.
John Updike
#87. We all begin life as parasites within the mother, and writers begin their existence imitatively, within the body of letters.
John Updike
#88. 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.
John Updike
#89. No act is so private it does not seek applause.
John Updike
#91. The clangor of the body shop comes up softly. It's noise comforts him, tells him he is hidden and safe, that while he hides men are busy nailing the world down, and toward the disembodied sounds his heart makes in darkness a motion of love.
John Updike
#92. All love is betrayal, in that it flatters life. The loveless man is best armed.
John Updike
#93. Musicians are very mysterious and wonderful people to me; I don't know how they do it.
John Updike
#94. Authors should be honored only for their works.
John Updike
#95. Some golfers, we are told, enjoy the landscape; but properly, the landscape shrivels and compresses into the grim, surrealistically vivid patch of grass directly under the golfer's eyes as he morosely walks toward where he thinks his ball might be.
John Updike
#96. 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
#97. We must have sinned greatly, at some juncture long buried in our protozoic past, to deserve such a universe
John Updike
#98. That's why we love disaster, Harry sees it, puts us back in touch with guilt and sends us crawling back to God
John Updike
#99. The difficulty with humorists is that they will mix what they believe with what they don't - whichever seems likelier to win an effect.
John Updike
#100. Americans have been conditioned to respect newness, whatever it costs them.
John Updike
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