Updike's Quotes

#1. Rain is grace; rain is the sky descending to the earth; without rain, there would be no life. - Author: John Updike

#2. That's why we love disaster, Harry sees it, puts us back in touch with guilt and sends us crawling back to God - Author: John Updike

#3. We must have sinned greatly, at some juncture long buried in our protozoic past, to deserve such a universe - Author: John Updike

#4. 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. - Author: John Updike

#5. 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. - Author: John Updike

#6. Authors should be honored only for their works. - Author: John Updike

#7. Musicians are very mysterious and wonderful people to me; I don't know how they do it. - Author: John Updike

#8. All love is betrayal, in that it flatters life. The loveless man is best armed. - Author: John Updike

#9. 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. - Author: John Updike

#10. I'm a dull person. - Author: John Updike

#11. No act is so private it does not seek applause. - Author: John Updike

#12. 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. - Author: John Updike

#13. We all begin life as parasites within the mother, and writers begin their existence imitatively, within the body of letters. - Author: John Updike

#14. The difficulty with humorists is that they will mix what they believe with what they don't - whichever seems likelier to win an effect. - Author: John Updike

#15. There are some women that don't do it for some men. That's why they turn out so many models. - Author: John Updike

#16. Geography! That's something they teach in the third grade! I never heard of a grownup studying geography. - Author: John Updike

#17. 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. - Author: John Updike

#18. My father taught only math. - Author: John Updike

#19. 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. - Author: John Updike

#20. I really don't want to encourage young writers. Keep them down and out and silent is my motto. - Author: John Updike

#21. Mozart's music gives us permission to live. - Author: John Updike

#22. 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. - Author: John Updike

#23. 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. - Author: John Updike

#24. 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. - Author: Carol Windley

#25. 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. - Author: John Updike

#26. I like middles ... It is in middles that extremes clash, where ambiguity restlessly rules. - Author: John Updike

#27. What interests me is why men think of women as witches. It's because they're so fascinating and exasperating, so other. - Author: John Updike

#28. Nature may be defined as that which exists without guilt. - Author: John Updike

#29. America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy. - Author: John Updike

#30. An earth hard as iron lay locked beneath a sky whose mottled clouds spit snow like ashes sucked up a chimney and then dispersed with the smoke. - Author: John Updike

#31. I see no intrinsic reason why a doubly talented artist might not arise and create a comic-strip novel masterpiece. - Author: John Updike

#32. Let us not seek to make it less monstrous, for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty, lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are embarrassed by the miracle, and crushed by remonstrance. - Author: John Updike

#33. Writers' lives break into two halves, - Author: John Updike

#34. Though old himself, he disliked old men. - Author: John Updike

#35. Growth is betrayal. - Author: John Updike

#36. Reagan has turned America into a tax haven. - Author: John Updike

#37. 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. - Author: John Updike

#38. Our lives fade behind us before we die. - Author: John Updike

#39. Our tears fatten upon our memories of joy. - Author: John Updike

#40. There's always something new by looking at the same thing over and over. - Author: John Updike

#41. 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. - Author: John Updike

#42. A room containing Philip Roth, I have noticed, begins hilariously to whirl and pulse with a mix of rebelliousness and constriction that I take to be Oedipal. - Author: John Updike

#43. I was trying to support a family with writing. I didn't have a private income. I had no other profession. - Author: John Updike

#44. The essential self is innocent, and when it tastes its own innocence knows that it lives for ever. - Author: John Updike

#45. All those little congruences and arabesques you prepared with such delicate anticipatory pleasure are gobbled up as if by pigs at a pastry cart. - Author: John Updike

#46. A cynic is a kind of romantic who has aged. - Author: John Updike

#47. The great thing about the dead, they make space. - Author: John Updike

#48. Fenway Park, in Boston, is a lyric little bandbox of a ballpark. Everything is painted green and seems in curiously sharp focus, like the inside of an old-fashioned peeping-type Easter egg. - Author: John Updike

#49. 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. - Author: John Updike

#50. Americans have been conditioned to respect newness, whatever it costs them. - Author: John Updike

#51. Of plants tomatoes seemed the most human, eager and fragile and prone to rot. - Author: John Updike

#52. In a way, gluttony is an athletic feat, a stretching exercise. - Author: John Updike

#53. The first breath of adultery is the freest; after it, constraints aping marriage develop. - Author: John Updike

#54. The heart prefers to move against the grain of circumstance; perversity is the souls very life. - Author: John Updike

#55. 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. - Author: John Updike

#56. 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. - Author: John Updike

#57. I have never liked haircuts. - Author: John Updike

#58. Gods don't answer letters. - Author: John Updike

#59. But it seems to me that once you begin a gesture it's fatal not to go through with it. - Author: John Updike

#60. Life is a razor, you are always in hot water or a scrape. - Author: John Updike

#61. Is not the decisive difference between comedy and tragedy that tragedy denies us another chance? - Author: John Updike

#62. 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. - Author: John Updike

#63. 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. - Author: Garrison Keillor

#64. One of the cool, chaste countries - Canada or Sweden. - Author: John Updike

#65. You know how it is with fathers, you never escape the idea that maybe after all they're right. - Author: John Updike

#66. Hemingway describes literary New York as a bottle full of tapeworms trying to feed on each other. - Author: John Updike

#67. 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. - Author: John Niven

#68. When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas.
- Author: John Updike

#69. Vagueness and procrastination are ever a comfort to the frail in spirit. - Author: John Updike

#70. 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. - Author: John Updike

#71. There is the fear that you somehow neglected to say what was really yours to say. - Author: John Updike

#72. Being able to write becomes a kind of shield, a way of hiding, a way of too instantly transforming pain into honey. - Author: John Updike

#73. 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. - Author: John Updike

#74. When I went away to college, I marveled at the wealth of bookstores around Harvard Square. - Author: John Updike

#75. Adversity in immunological doses has its uses; more than that crushes. - Author: John Updike

#76. Be what you are. Don't try to be Sally or Johnny or Fred next door; be yourself. - Author: John Updike

#77. The golf swing is like a suitcase into which we are trying to pack one too many things. - Author: John Updike

#78. 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. - Author: John Updike

#79. School is where you go between when your parents can't take you and industry can't take you. - Author: John Updike

#80. Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right, or better. - Author: John Updike

#81. 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. - Author: John Updike

#82. 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. - Author: John Updike

#83. Fiction is nothing less than the subtlest instrument for self-examination and self-display that Mankind has invented yet. - Author: John Updike

#84. Chinese food in Texas is the best Chinese food in the United States except Boston. - Author: John Updike

#85. Humor is my default mode. - Author: John Updike

#86. So much love, too much love, it is our madness, it is rotting us out, exploding us like dandelion polls. - Author: John Updike

#87. Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face. - Author: John Updike

#88. The world keeps ending but new people too dumb to know it keep showing up as if the fun's just started. - Author: John Updike

#89. 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. - Author: John Updike

#90. It's the strange thing about you mystics, how often your little ecstasies wear a skirt. - Author: John Updike

#91. 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. - Author: John Updike

#92. 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. - Author: John Updike

#93. 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. - Author: John Updike

#94. But seriously, what were his parents thinking? Naming their son Richard Updike? Did they want him to get beaten up his entire adolescence? - Author: Carolyn McCray

#95. The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding. - Author: John Updike

#96. The dead teach this great lesson, which we are loathe to learn: we too will die. - Author: John Updike

#97. A photograph offers us a glimpse into the abyss of time. - Author: John Updike

#98. It is easy to love people in memory; the hard thing is to love them when they are there in front of you. - Author: John Updike

#99. 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. - Author: John Updike

#100. 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. - Author: John Updike